The Significance
An aging attorney population pushes the issue of succession planning front and center. Honoring long-time leaders while ushering in a new generation of management can be a delicate transition, according to Jill Switzer, a California-based mediator and former senior vice president and assistant general counsel for Bank of the West. Focusing on the transition process “early and often” can help firms avoid an undignified exit for a longstanding leader, Switzer said.
“It’s a difficult question; how do you value the contributions that these leaders have made while saying, ‘What about the next generation?’” she said. “It’s all about dignity, and how do you make that transition palatable and achieve the firm’s goals and maybe even achieve the parting person’s goals.”
In July, Dolchin Slotkin & Todd in Philadelphia and Ganfer Shore Leeds & Zauderer in New York shuttered after the retirement of their founding partners. Former Ganfer Shore name partner Mark Zauderer said that succession planning is particularly difficult for small law firms, where the “client relationships that generate business tend to be in the hands of a few senior people.”
Dan Siegel, chair of the Pennsylvania Bar Association Committee on Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility, said the committee has received a number of inquiries regarding succession, including if there are programs that could be offered by bar associations. Siegel said that the state’s disciplinary board was seeking a rule from the Supreme Court on succession planning.
Ellen Brotman, who is also a member of the committee, said she anticipates the board will weigh whether to mandate a succession planning rule. “It’s a very sensible thing for them to be thinking about right now as our population of lawyers are aging,” Brotman said.
The Information
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The Forecast
A rule enforcing succession planning could potentially help firms overcome what some call “a lawyer mindset” to prepare for the future. The mindset comes from the sometimes conflicting roles as business leaders and practicing attorneys.
Patrick Cusick, director of law firm services at consultancy Armanino, said firm managers can struggle when they have to deal with business issues as opposed to their trained area of expertise, legal matters. “[They end up] approaching basic business problems with this lawyer mindset [or] approach,” Cusick explained.
In some cases, this mindset can cause firm leaders to focus on immediate action and short-term results, as opposed to looking toward the horizon, according to Angela Sebastian, the former non-lawyer CEO of Chicago firm Levenfeld Pearlstein.
“It’s really hard to get law firms to embrace long-term planning because there’s a high sense of urgency for the immediate, [such as meeting] immediate client demands [or] immediate short-term performance,” said Sebastian, who now heads up leadership advising and coaching firm Sebastian Strategies.
In the meantime, the legal industry might learn a lot about succession planning from post-mortems of fallen firms.
