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The American Bar Association is offering its first-ever employee buyout in advance of a planned major reorganization this spring.

Employees with at least 20 years of service—and whose age and years of service combined equal at least 75—will receive 15 months of their base pay if they choose to leave, ABA executive director Jack Rives said in an interview Thursday. The buyout comes at a time when the ABA is grappling with revenue declines and a shrinking number of paid members.

Rives declined to say how many of the ABA's 910 employees qualify for the buyout. He said the organization does not have a specific goal for the number of employees who depart through the buyout program, but that those departures will help inform how the ABA restructures in the coming months. Everyone who applies for the buyout will be accepted, he said.

“When you reorganize, it frequently means you will eliminate or transform some positions,” Rives said. “I realized that if we do a substantial reorganization, which we're looking at doing probably in mid-April, we'd potentially be affecting some of our longtime, very loyal and good employees.”

The ABA's standard severance package, which is two months pay with an additional two weeks of pay for every year of service capped at 24 weeks, didn't seem appropriate for longtime employees whose jobs will be eliminated in the reorganization, Rives said. Hence, the ABA's board of governors approved the one-time buyouts with 15 months of pay as an incentive for long-serving employees to retire or move on.

“Fifteen months is a generous payout,” he said. “Some people accepted the offer within 24 hours.”

Eligible employees have until March 2 to signal that they want to take the buyout. (They have 45 days to change their minds, in accordance with federal law.) Most who take the buyout will leave the ABA on March 31, though Rives said he may ask certain key employees to stay on for longer.

That the ABA wants to shrink its employee ranks isn't terribly surprising given its financial challenges. It cut nearly $11 million from its general operations budget in fiscal year 2018. According to a presentation from treasurer Michelle Behnke to the ABA's House of Delegates last week, an additional $5 million in cuts are needed for the coming year. The ABA posted a $7.7 million operating deficit in 2017, she said.

Meanwhile, the percentage of U.S. lawyers who are ABA members has fallen from 50 percent 40 years ago to 22 percent today, Rives told the House of Delegates.The ABA is developing a new membership model it hopes will help reverse that decline.

“We're concerned about a number of trends we're seeing, including the percentage of America's lawyer who are members and the number of dues-paying members we have,” Rives said.