Latham and its peers are turning retirement coaching into succession infrastructure.
There is a quiet revolution in the corner offices of America’s biggest law firms. It has nothing to do with billable hours and everything to do with succession.
Major firms including Latham & Watkins, Morgan Lewis, and Debevoise are doing something almost unheard of in corporate America: they are actively, systematically, and expensively helping their most senior partners stop working. They are not simply firing people. They are not relying only on mandatory-retirement provisions. They are hiring outside retirement-transition consultants, including a husband-and-wife operation in Tucson called Zelinka Parsons, which has worked with Latham for more than a decade, runs roughly 40 retreats a year, and now has about a dozen large clients. Mayer Brown is considering following suit.
The proposition is presented as humane. It is also a confession.
Roughly one-third of American lawyers are 55 or older, and 14 percent of that group is over 65, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited in the discussion around the trend. Lawyers commonly practice into their 80s and 90s. Their client relationships are deep, their institutional knowledge is real, and their craft is often at its peak. The senior partner is not automatically dead weight.
But the arithmetic at the top of a partnership is not sentimental. Senior partners hold equity, collect profit shares, control client relationships, and can block case flow to younger partners. Clients may remain loyal to the individual rather than the firm’s payroll chart. Younger partners cannot inherit a practice merely because an organizational chart says the time has come. When senior lawyers linger indefinitely, the next generation waits indefinitely.
That is a bottleneck.
The legal profession has spent years pretending it is not one. The smarter firms have decided to solve it without pretending that the people causing the blockage are worthless.
The Wachtell episode made the point in public. Six lawyers left Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz for Gibson Dunn earlier this year — a move that stunned the legal world. One reported explanation was that the firm was not clearing the way for new leadership. Wachtell disputes that characterization. The counterargument is equally clear: the departing lawyers had built practices worth following, and client loyalty follows the lawyer, not the firm’s payroll chart.
Both statements can be true. Senior partners are the crown jewels of the profession. They can also become the locked door behind which the profession’s next generation waits.
The numbers explain why firms are now spending real money on the problem. Equity partners winding down may still receive a percentage of firm profits. Younger partners may be unable to inherit clients because the clients will not move. Top performers may leave, sometimes with practice teams behind them. In that setting, a retirement program is not a courtesy package. It is succession infrastructure.
Latham’s program illustrates the machinery. The firm has worked with Zelinka Parsons for more than a decade. Elizabeth Zelinka Parsons founded the consultancy in 2009 with her husband, David Parsons, after her own dislocating exit from a decade at Milbank. She described the experience this way: “I felt like someone with a superpower and didn’t know where to put it.”
The consultants offer one-on-one counseling and group retreats. They ask questions that lawyers, trained to work, argue, negotiate, and bill, are not accustomed to answering. How would you spend your first day of retirement? What would you do if success were guaranteed?
The premise can sound condescending. These are people who closed multibillion-dollar transactions and argued at the highest levels. They do not need a life coach to establish that they are accomplished. They may need something more practical: permission to stop treating the partnership as the only place their ability can have value.
John Balsdon spent 25 years as a Latham corporate lawyer, working 80-hour weeks and closing cross-border energy deals. He initially resisted the transition program. “It’s in the DNA of lawyers to work,” he said. He retired in December 2024 at 59. His next act became an aerial-photography business, with helicopter shoots in remote locations. Earlier this year, he traveled from Nordkapp in Norway to Cape Agulhas in South Africa in 28 days, setting a world record for the cape-to-cape journey. His work was later shown at an exhibition at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
That is not a consolation prize. It is a second career.
Sven Völcker, a longtime top litigator at WilmerHale and later Latham, retired last year at 59 expecting to start an arbitration business. After counseling, he took a course at the New York Film Academy and wrote 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 of high-stakes real estate, financing, and M&A work. When asked what he would do if success were guaranteed, he said he wanted to become a Broadway producer. He started small in Chicago. Within a few years, he had co-produced Hadestown, which won a Tony Award. He has since launched a production company working on the current revival of The Rocky Horror Show. After years of tracking his time in six-minute increments, he is glad not to quantify how he spends it.
Other retirees have moved into screenwriting, volunteer paramedic work, wineries, wedding venues, university coursework in medieval cartography, and the study of early twentieth-century Japanese art.
The profession’s accumulated wisdom is real. So is the possibility that accumulated control becomes accumulated blockage.
Kirsten Vasquez, head of lateral recruiting at Major, Lindsey & Africa, stated the underlying problem with unusual economy: “Clients don’t ask how old my lawyer is.” Senior partners deliver clients, credibility, and institutional relationships that younger lawyers cannot manufacture on a five-year partnership track. But that same client loyalty can prevent orderly succession. A firm cannot simply reassign trust through an org-chart move.
Lisa Smith, a principal at Fairfax Associates, supplied the other half of the warning: “Sometimes people wait until it’s too late.” Too late for the firm, in her formulation. Too late for the senior partner, too, if retirement begins only after identity, health, relationships, and curiosity have all been subordinated to the partnership.
The retirement-transition industry is therefore both a solution and a symptom. The retreats, the equity-share step-downs, the pension packages, the “How would you spend your first day of retirement?” scripts — all exist because the profession built careers with extraordinary intensity and exits with almost none.
Latham’s retirement committee head, Jim Barker, said the firm wants to pour “as much on the back end as the front end.” He has also described the goal as keeping the firm “culturally young.” The legal strategy is cultural continuity. A firm that treats senior lawyers as disposable will lose the relationships and institutional memory that made it valuable. A firm that treats them as permanently indispensable will suffocate its own succession.
The answer is neither forced clearance nor indefinite tenure. It is a real alternative to clinging: flexible equity structures, generous pension arrangements, deliberate client-transition planning, and serious investment in a second career. The point is not to tell senior partners that they are obsolete. It is to make departure something other than professional death.
Parsons has identified the pressure directly. The trend is “unmistakable,” she said. “There is a talent war out there. It’s easier to recruit them away where they can lead a practice.”
That is why the six Wachtell departures matter, whatever one thinks of the firm’s internal explanation. Senior partners are valuable enough to recruit. Practice teams are portable. A blocked path above talented younger lawyers has a price, and the price is often paid in departures.
The larger lesson reaches beyond law. America has a workforce problem masquerading as a retirement problem. Workers in many professions remain in roles long past the historical norm, not because they are incapable of change but because institutions have invested heavily in the first act and almost nothing in the second. Law firms reveal the pattern early because partnership equity, billable hours, and client-loyalty lock-in make the bottleneck visible.
The firms now investing in transition consulting are not declaring their senior partners worthless. They are admitting that value must move. Aerial photography in remote locations, a screenplay about underground DJs and lawyers, a Tony-winning Broadway production, a winery, a paramedic uniform, a medieval-cartography course: they are evidence that professional identity was never the whole person.
The senior partner is the backbone. The permanent bottleneck is the institutional failure.
Retirement, done seriously, is one of the great underbuilt industries of the next decade. The firms that learned to build a second act before the first became a locked door will look very smart in five years.