In 2013, Thompson Hine managing partner Deborah Read was astonished to find that attorneys over 59 handled one-third of the firm's client relationships.

"When I first looked at it," she says, "I was taken aback, because we weren't paying too much attention to it."

The firm's expected retirement age was around 65, which meant that the majority of this outsized group of partners would be retiring within a decade. At the time, Thompson Hine had no formal client transition process.

Read realized that the mass retirement of such a large and influential generation had to be handled proactively. If the firm didn't address the issue, she thought, it would lose a large chunk of those clients. Putting together a plan to successfully transition clients en masse became a priority.

Across the legal industry, nearly every firm is facing the same dilemma: How does a firm retain clients as more than a quarter of a firm's relationship partners head toward retirement?

The Pew Research Center defines the baby boomer generation as those born between 1946 and 1964, making the today's youngest baby boomer 55 years old and the oldest 73. The generation is currently the largest, numbering 72 million, all told.

As is the case with Thompson Hine, the generation's control of the purse is significant: Baby boomers handle about 25% of law firm matters, according to Altman Weil consultant Eric Seeger. A 2016 ALM analysis found that nearly half of the Am Law 200 partnership was over age 52.

More than any previous generation, baby boomers are working longer. Pew found that 66% of the younger band of the generation, aged 55 to 65, are still working. In 2018, 29% of baby boomers aged 65 to 72 were still in the work force, a participation rate notably higher than the silent generation (21%) and the greatest generation (19%) at those same ages.

Credit: Joe Kovach

With firms moving away from mandatory retirement ages, experts agree that the best way to manage large waves of retirements and to ensure client retention is to create a thoughtful, long-term process that begins years before a partner retires.

Thompson Hine put just such a process in place after its 2013 revelation. To ensure smooth client transitions, the firm created a formal step-down approach. It enters into an arrangement with a senior partner, transitioning them into an income partner, with their compensation tied to contributions not just toward billing but also toward the transition process.

Clients, potential junior partner successors and timetables are all included in the detailed transition plan. The goal, Read says, is to have a process that respects everybody involved while ensuring that clients are retained after the relationship partner leaves. This retirement process can begin at any age. For example, a Thompson Hine senior partner retired this year at 66 after starting the process in 2014 at 61.

Today, 37% of the firm's clients are handled by partners over age 59—a marginal increase from 2013—and 16 partners are currently going through the retirement process. Read doesn't expect, nor necessarily want, the formal process to affect the influence of senior partners. With a generation so large, she expects the share of clients handled by older partners to hover around one-third for a while. What is most important for Thompson Hine is that it avoids hemorrhaging clients as senior partners retire. And in that respect, Read says, the firm has been very successful.

Eleven partners have transitioned through the retirement process since 2013. Nine of those agreements have resulted in a near-perfect client transition, Read says. The other two didn't have many clients to transition, she notes.

"Because we have a managed process, it doesn't concern me now. There are more important questions than the percentage," Read says. "Are we accomplishing the client transition? Are the clients staying with the firm? For the most part, we've been successful."

Two years ago, Thompson Hine real estate partner Linda Striefsky met Read over breakfast, and the pair talked retirement. Striefsky wanted to join her husband, a former Thompson Hine partner, in retirement bliss and travel across the world. Read wanted to ensure that the firm kept her clients.

Striefsky agreed to take on fewer hours and work to fully transition her long-term clients to junior partners, a process that has been nearly flawless, she says.

But Striefsky says her willingness to retire made the process easier. For many, she acknowledges, retirement is a fraught subject. Some fear that they'll be lost without the prestige, the constant calls and lunches. Others lost a large portion of their savings in the 2008 recession or aren't in two-income families, like Striefsky and her husband.

Deborah Read of Thompson Hine

Some partners considering retirement avoid even bringing up the subject for fear that a firm might push them to ­transition their clients and work less, she says. Others may go the opposite route, as Striefsky's husband did, and retire quickly, shelving their cellphones in celebration and gleefully ignoring their email inboxes.

No matter the specifics of a partner's situation or the difficulties that might arise, Striefsky says it's important to have a process that can account for the varied perspectives on retirement. In exchange for working to transition clients, Thompson Hine compensated her to reflect her efforts—a factor she thinks is important in a smooth transition.

"I didn't think I was being penalized." Striefksy says. "You have to think of ways to give incentives. It's going to happen. The question is: Are you going to handle it in a way that's mutually agreeable? You don't want to lose the clients and you don't want a grumpy partner taking their relationships to another law firm."

Incentivizing partners by tying their compensation to transition outcomes is one of the most important factors in successful retirement processes, says Kent Zimmermann, a principal with consulting firm Zeughauser Group. Relying on the traditional billing and origination model rewards senior partners for hanging onto their clients as long as possible.

"Firms that are effective in this front tie transitions to money," Zimmermann says. "It's important to align the firm's interest with the partner's interest, using money. Some firms use a carrot, some use a stick, some both."

Day Pitney is looking to tweak its compensation model as it works to finalize its own formal retirement process within months so it will be prepared for the large number of senior partners at the firm who are between the ages of 65 and 73.

In the past, the firm had an informal system that began with a pilot program for the firm's senior trusts and estates partners. The firm worked with senior partners individually to reduce hours and client responsibilities, compensating them in an ad hoc manner, where transition success wasn't always a factor.