US law firms deploy creative incentives to push senior partners into retirement

Older partners pivot to screenwriting, aerial photography, Broadway producing

Major US law firms, confronting a bottleneck as senior partners delay retirement, are deploying an unusual mix of financial packages, equity-share reductions, and one-on-one life coaching to nudge older partners off the partnership track. The push comes as the legal industry’s age skew — with roughly a third of American lawyers 55 or older — collides with an active poaching market for top performers and with a dynamic in which younger partners are being stifled in promotions and prevented from getting bigger cases and choice assignments.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by the Journal, roughly a third of lawyers in the United States are 55 or older; of that group, 14 percent are over 65. It is not unusual for lawyers to continue working well into their 80s and even 90s.

The demographics are producing a bottleneck at elite firms. Senior partners who remain in place are limiting the flow of major cases and choice assignments to younger partners, while firms simultaneously face an active market for top performers and, in some cases, entire practice teams being hired away by competitors. Kirsten Vasquez, head of lateral recruiting at Major, Lindsey & Africa, said balancing the need to free up work for the next generation against the risk of losing clients loyal to older partners is a tricky problem. “Clients don’t ask how old my lawyer is,” she said. Without handing off business, younger partners are not set up to inherit clients smoothly — and firms are eager to avoid situations in which equity partners hold their positions while winding down their practice or taking less work, which can squeeze the finances of those lower in the ranks.

When six lawyers recently left Wachtell for Gibson Dunn in a move that stunned the legal world, one of the reasons, according to people familiar with the matter, was a feeling that Wachtell was not clearing the way for new leadership — a characterization the firm disputes.

The problem of older lawyers lingering at firms is longstanding, and the responses have evolved. Some firms impose mandatory retirement ages, typically around 65, or offer generous pension packages. Others reduce the equity share held by partners who are winding down, lowering the percentage of firm profits those partners take home. Latham & Watkins, Morgan Lewis, Debevoise and other large firms have gone further, hiring outside consultants to help aging partners imagine and plan for life after partnership. One of the most established of those practices is Zelinka Parsons, a husband-and-wife consulting business based in Tucson, Arizona, that offers one-on-one counseling and group retreats and has worked with Latham for more than a decade. The firm now has about a dozen large clients and runs 40 retreats a year.

John Balsdon was one Latham partner who took advantage of the program. During a 25-year career as a corporate lawyer, he regularly logged 80-hour weeks, closing cross-border deals for global energy companies and advising on multibillion-dollar transactions. He initially resisted retirement. “It’s in the DNA of lawyers to work,” he said. After sessions with the Zelinka Parsons team — which pushed him to be more introspective and asked him to reflect on how many healthy years he had left and what he planned to do with them, two years at a time — Balsdon initially struggled even with simple questions such as “How would you spend your first day of retirement?” His love of traveling and photography, and the consultants’ questions, helped him see he could funnel that passion into a second career; the firm helped him plan what it would take. He retired in December 2024 at 59 and now runs a business taking aerial photography from helicopters in remote locations around the world. His work was shown at a recent exhibition at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Earlier this year, he said, he broke a world record by traveling “cape to cape” from Nordkapp, Norway, to Cape Agulhas, South Africa, in 28 days.

Other recently retired lawyers have taken similarly sharp left turns. Sven Völcker, a longtime top litigator at WilmerHale and later Latham who retired last year at 59, initially thought he might start an arbitration business. After retirement counseling, he took a course at the New York Film Academy and has since written a screenplay — a romantic comedy set at the intersection of an underground DJ scene and the legal world. David Shapiro retired from Latham at 55 after three decades handling high-stakes real estate, financing and M&A deals. When Parsons asked him what he would do if he could be guaranteed success, he confessed his dream of becoming a Broadway producer. He started small, investing in smaller plays in Chicago, and within a few years co-produced “Hadestown,” which won a Tony Award. He has since launched a production company that is working on the current revival of “The Rocky Horror Show.” Shapiro said people still ask him the pesky question: What do you do all day in retirement? He often replies that after years of tracking his time in six-minute increments, he is glad to no longer quantify how he spends it. Other retirees have moved into screenwriting, volunteer paramedic work, wineries, and wedding venues; one started taking university courses in medieval cartography and early 20th-century Japanese art.

Lisa Smith, a principal at Fairfax Associates, a consulting firm that advises firms on retirement transitions, said: “Sometimes people wait until it’s too late.” Vasquez, of Major, Lindsey & Africa, added: “The risks are inevitable and they plan for them rather than risk being surprised by them. They are doing this with some intention.”

Jim Barker, head of Latham’s retirement committee, which oversees employee benefits and partner transitions, said the firm invests heavily both in training new recruits and in guiding partners near the end of their careers to keep the firm “culturally young” as a business strategy. Latham, already one of the largest firms in the world, has grown rapidly in recent years. The firm often offers various financial incentives for partners when they turn 55, in addition to counseling through Zelinka Parsons. “We want to pour as much on the back end as the front end,” Barker said.

Before Elizabeth Zelinka Parsons, 58, founded her consulting firm in 2009 with her husband, David Parsons, she herself was a corporate lawyer. She worked at Milbank for a decade in Washington, D.C., and quit to help raise her children. “I was unprepared for how dislocating it ended up being,” she said. “I felt like someone with a superpower and didn’t know where to put it.” Recently, the consulting firm has been fielding calls from major firms such as Mayer Brown that are considering the program to create space for younger partners. “There is a talent war out there,” Parsons said. “It’s easier to recruit them away where they can lead a practice. That trend is unmistakable.” When lawyers first start talking, Parsons said, they often gravitate toward pursuits that are similar to what they have always done, such as sitting on a corporate board or taking an in-house job at a company.