The partnership demographic at U.K. law firms is “a ticking time bomb,” a report on the legal profession warned this fall. “The Paradox of Partner Retirement,” published in September by consultancy Jomati Partners, claims that many U.K. law firms fail to effectively manage the transition between generations of partners or to engage them on retirement issues. “For the majority, their retirement planning remains haphazard,” the report says.
It’s something that Guy Beringer, the former senior partner of U.K. Magic Circle firm Allen & Overy, experienced firsthand when he left the law in 2008. “I was only 52, so I didn’t even want to talk about retiring—I wanted to know what I was going to do with the last third of my career,” Beringer says. “But I’d explain to headhunters that I’d run a global business with a revenue of a billion pounds, and they’d ask me if I wanted to be a general counsel,” he says.
