Leaving Law - Law firm partner retirement
Law firm partner retirement is fraught with challenges.
When partners approach retirement - or consider moving on to another career - they discover that there are very few roles that require them to have been a lawyer. Other than continuing to be a lawyer. Yet few partners want to move from private practice into a legal role. Most are looking for a portfolio career which they can slowly run down as they approach 70. The promise of full retirement at 55 which was prevalent in the boom times is rarely mentioned.
Preparing emotionally for this change in lifestyle is often accompanied by a sense of bewilderment. If professional skills aren’t sufficient to secure other roles, what is? The advice to “network” is usually both too late and ill-advised, since the partners’ skills are honed on securing legal work, not exploring alternative careers.
The answer is to realise that it is who you are that will get you roles, not what you are. It’s the total package that you bring. But for most partners, this level of internal reflection is both alien and uncomfortable. Asking partners to identify their transferrable skills, how they get things done and identifying the types of organisation they would flourish in is too big a stretch. Too easily written off as a “touchy-feely” exercise which jars with the apparently rational working world.
Books can help. The hardy perennial “what colour is your parachute” is a good primer, but again a partner starts a long way back, since all they have considered previously is how to be a better lawyer. The best place to start is with an external audit – working with a trained professional who can extract the information, do the analysis and present back the conclusions. Not a “career coach” or a “transition specialist”. A personal audit.
This is something we do at Pennington Hennessy (“Take Counsel”), and is probably done elsewhere. Although not as well (OK, that’s personal bias). It’s an old sales adage that “you can’t sell what you don’t own”. Partners looking to move on need to find out what it is they are selling.