Are city firm partners over the hill at 55 or 60? And is experience overrated? Many senior lawyers disagree and tell Lucy Trevelyan how they can offer an invaluable client service


Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal. An old joke maybe, but one that apparently holds a grain of truth as far as the legal profession is concerned. Many City firms insist that their partners retire between the ages of 55 and 60; senior lawyers argue that this is a waste of talent.


Gerald Hobson, managing partner of US firm Faegre Benson Hobson Audley’s London office, maintains older lawyers have much to offer their practices and younger colleagues. He says: ‘Many junior lawyers have little idea as to how best to market to clients and prospective clients, how to retain clients once they have secured their business and, most important of all, how to cross-market and introduce those clients to other partners and associates within the firm, so as to better secure the relationship going forward for the mutual benefit of both parties.


‘The advantage of being a senior lawyer – and I speak from experience – is that you tend to have seen it all, which means you can address the occasional crisis with a sang-froid largely alien to many younger lawyers. There is also the ability to predict the possible outcome of events with a confidence and assurance that comes only with experience.’


Mr Hobson insists that depending on the talent, drive and ambition of senior lawyers, there is no reason why they cannot continue to play an active role in representing clients, but he adds: ‘It is prudent to spend time considering how best to ensure that, if the senior lawyer is a relationship partner, a smooth transfer of their clients is engineered some time before retirement.’


Older lawyers can also play an important part in stressing the importance of ethics to their younger colleagues. ‘This is certainly something that we emphasise from time to time in mentoring junior lawyers within the firm. There remains no place in the City for that proverbial short cut to please a client,’ adds Mr Hobson.


Peter Scragg, former senior partner and now a consultant at Burton-on-Trent firm, Goodger Auden, who retired aged 60 six years ago, comments: ‘Some senior lawyers are probably a pain in the neck and an obstacle to progress. Others perhaps can be an enormous help, especially if younger partners look at them with fresh eyes and see that they could have an entirely new role quite unlike what they had been doing in the past and be more of an asset than any recruited from outside. Gravitas is an over-used word but I think I commanded respect – and still do.’


Tony Sacker, partnership specialist and consultant at London firm Kingsley Napley, says: ‘I am not convinced UK law firms use older people as effectively as they might, or that today’s business culture gives sufficient value to experience. Partners in the US, for example, retire much later – working up to 70 is not uncommon. It’s useful for younger lawyers to talk to people who have been around for longer.’


But Nigel Boardman, a partner at City firm Slaughter and May, says experience is not all it’s cracked up to be. ‘Experience is overrated. In technical terms, what worked ten years or even five years ago is no longer likely to be of any relevance today. Experience may have some advantage in terms of people handling, although it depends more on the mindset of the individual than it does on their age.’


Mr Boardman says changing attitudes within some firms have had a negative effect on all their partners – not just older partners – as well as their clients. ‘I don’t think the “factory firms” that have sacrificed the benefits of partnership for the misperceived “benefits” of a faceless bureaucracy make the most of the special skills of many of their partners, because they want them all to slot into prefabricated boxes. This is true for older partners as well as all other partners. It is one of the reasons for the levels of lateral movement between firms. It also leads to client dissatisfaction with the service they receive since they do not want firms that treat them like numbers – and partners who are treated like numbers find it hard to treat their clients differently.’


Mr Hobson says although many senior lawyers play a useful role in their firms with clients who continue to instruct them, as a generalisation, most senior lawyers are viewed by their junior partners as being ‘in the way’.


‘If you are a senior lawyer at the top of lockstep, and winding down to retirement, it must be galling for a young, thrusting junior partner to observe that you appear to work half the hours they work, but receive a profit share three or four times greater,’ he says.


Mr Scragg says some younger lawyers do not understand the important role senior lawyers play, but agrees the latter can push things too far. At pains to point out that he is not talking about his own former partners, he says: ‘Older partners must realise they cannot spend every day on the golf course. But although they may be producing less indirectly earned fees, they are still producing for the firm indirectly with their contacts built up over many years, and with the general influence and support they can give. But there are limits. No older partner should develop the notion that he can swan around doing nothing and be indispensable.’


Mr Sacker adds: ‘It seems to be the larger the firm, the earlier people retire. It’s a combination of pressure from below to make room for younger lawyers, and one can’t ignore the fact that in larger firms, some senior partners might have been earning more than £1 million a year and by the time they get to their mid-50s, they simply don’t need, or want, to work again.’


Mr Scragg does not regret having retired when he did, but with hindsight he maintains that his partnership could have benefited if he had been given a part-time role that included talking to existing clients to ensure they were happy with the service they were getting, as well as potential new clients.


‘This would have suited me. Having always been an out-and-abouter, I have continued to recommend the firm when I can, but this could have been developed into a more fully recognised and systemised role. I did not at the time feel that all of my younger partners were convinced that such a role – which didn’t involve recording matter-related chargeable time – was sustainable economically in Burton-on-Trent. They may well have been right.’


Many older lawyers, he says, would welcome extra cash earned from this sort of role in early semi-retirement – even if it was far less remuneration than they may have been earning as a partner.


Mr Scragg has not been idle since his retirement – apart from his consultancy role, he has studied languages, taken teaching courses and undertaken mentoring roles, including signing up for the LawWorks Senior Project, an initiative run by the Solicitors Pro Bono Group that uses senior lawyers’ skills to help practitioners around the world by matching their talents with international projects (see [2005] Gazette, 21 April, 6).

He was one of the four mentors who assisted the four Commonwealth Fellows during a course last February and still tries to keep in touch with his mentee, Maggie Mitchell, as she strives to establish a regulatory law association in the Eastern Caribbean Federation.


Mr Scragg says: ‘This was a good example of how I could use my age and experience to very good advantage while always feeling that I had sympathetic younger ones around to help me through what are now termed “senior moments”. The environment was friendly and stimulating and, on my first tentative return to any activity as a solicitor since retiring, I felt appreciated.’


Mr Boardman, who has also joined the LawWorks Senior Project, says: ‘I think it’s great to find something that can draw on their skills and enable them to give back to the legal community.’


He says that as far as clients are concerned, the age of a lawyer does not come into it. ‘What clients want is a high-quality committed service from likeable people who have their interests at heart – age is not relevant,’ he says.


So is there anything that younger lawyers can bring to a law firm that senior lawyers often cannot? ‘Hair,’ says Mr Boardman.


Lucy Trevelyan is a freelance journalist