The Life of a Lawyer, Start to Finish: Retirement

Episode Notes

Transcript

J. Craig Williams: Before we begin the show we’d like to thank our sponsors, Infotrack, Embroker, Posh Virtual Receptionist and GoDaddy Domain Broker Services.

[Music]

Intro: Stay curious. Revive your curiosity if you’ve lost it because part of the danger of being successful as a lawyer is thinking you have answers and being called on to be the expert but retirement is something that’s going to be new, it’s a new status, it’s a new way of living of spending your time and so instead of shutting down or feeling that it’s a loss and looking back of what you’re giving up, be curious about what the possibilities because the world is field with all source of interest, all source of things that you can explore and move into and try out.

Intro: Welcome to the award winning podcast Lawyer 2 Lawyer, with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession, you’re listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams: Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams coming to you from Southern California, I write a blog named May It Please the Court and have two books out titled How To Get Sued and The Sled. In our ongoing series in The Life of a Lawyer, Start to Finish we’re exploring the experience of becoming and being an attorney from applying to law schools through retirement and everything in between, maybe beyond. In our last episode in this series, we discussed money management with LJ Jones. On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about retirement, we’re going to take a look at when to start thinking about retiring as a lawyer, steps attorneys can take to prepare for retirement and ultimately life post retirement. And to do that, our guest today is Ida Abbott. She is the founder of Ida Abbott Consulting and she’s been in the legal profession as a lawyer consultant and thought leader for more than four decades. She was one of the first people to specialize in lawyers’ professional development and retention and in advancing women in the leadership. She remains a leading expert on mentoring and sponsorship is a means to guide support and transform professional careers. Ida supports her clients by helping them create retirements that are right for them, their families and their firms. Ida is also the author of retirement by design. Welcome to the show Ida.

Ida Abbott: Thank you, Craig. It’s a pleasure to be here.

J. Craig Williams: Well I’m thrilled to have you on in this continuing series that we’ve been doing on The Life of a Lawyer from Start to Finish. It’s been a very exciting set of interviews. But let’s talk about you first. Give us some background about yourself. Talk to us about your path and how it led you to consulting with clients, especially attorneys about retirement.

Ida Abbott: Well, I was a trial lawyer for about 20 years and then I left to do consulting work because I saw a great need for firms to be organizing and more systematic in the way they brought on and trained and prepared the young lawyers that they hired to be effective practitioners. And so, I did that for a long time, got involved in the other areas you kindly mentioned about advancing women and mentoring and sponsorship and leadership development but as many of my clients got older, they started asking me questions about what happens next, you know, I’m the managing partner of this firm and I’ve been doing that for a while but I’m either going to be termed out or I’m getting tired of it. But if I stop, what am I going to do? Can I rebuild my practice when I’m 55 or 60? And so anyway, there were a lot of questions, I brought a group together for lunch, just to say you’re all asking the same questions. Maybe you should talk to each other. They decided they wanted to continue to have conversations but they wanted somebody to help facilitate. So I wound up doing that and had to do some research in order to do that effectively. And the more I did that, the more I looked into it. I realize all of the planning for the future for people in their 50s and 60s was about financial planning. And yet, I think what actually inspired me to take this further was one of the members of the group. Had told me that she spoke to her father when he had been retired about 10 years, he retired at 65, he had been a serial entrepreneur made a lot of money. And he told her he was very successful. He did everything he set out to do financially and so he could be secure and his family would be secure when he retired and he spent the last 10 years bored out of his mind.

J. Craig Williams: That is a problem when people retire. One thing that I’ve heard frequently, but let’s kind of back this one up a little bit where, or when should you start with your retirement planning?

(00:05:07)

Ida Abbott: Today. I start today, whatever your age, because the workforce and the way we work is going to be changing and if you’re young and even, you know, fairly early in your career, you may be what we call I don’t know what, I like to think of it in more like sabbaticals or taking time out to reassess and shift, but it’s going to be unusual for people to be working through in the same career for 40 years or 50 years. And if longevity is allowing us to live older healthier lives, not just old, and feeble but actually healthy and productive. Not many people will be able to afford to retire in their 60s, and most of them won’t want to. So if you’re going to have a long career, it may take multiple forms, and you may be moving in and out and so financially you have to be thinking differently, but you also have to be thinking about how you’re going to live your life and the different stages that you might go through because of where you are in your life.

J. Craig Williams: Well let’s take a look at those various stages I mean I personally, I’m 65, still enjoying practicing and want to continue to practice, but just not at the same pace I used to practice at 80 hours a week and as you I’m a trial attorney. Should I have started in my 20s and if I did start in like 20s, what was I supposed to do and or 30s, 40s, 50s, what age brackets require what kinds of plan?

Ida Abbott: Well I think certainly financially you want to start early. In terms of your career and career planning you might think about the things that you enjoy doing and that give you meaning but also I think we hear a lot about flexibility today. We hear about it mostly, we used to hear about it from women we kind of — you know we sort of foreshadowed what we’re going to be seeing more of which is taking time out to have kids, maybe it’s a few months, maybe it’s a few years but then coming back into the workforce and starting either in a new career, in the same career, taking a different kind of job and moving forward. So you know, you want to be doing and if we’re talking specifically about retirement, then of course we’re talking about people in their 50s and 60s and 70s, starting to plan for whatever the next stage is, it doesn’t mean retire the way many people visualize it, which is either, you know, 24/7 leisure or being totally bored and sitting on the porch waiting to die. You know, there are a lot of negative stereotypes and social mental models about retirement. But I think we have to just think of that careers as more cyclical, more flexible, when you have a family, you’re going to be thinking more long term in thinking differently than when you’re single, it may happen at different points in your life and you may have different demands on you. So at the same time, you’re developing your current career, you don’t want to lose sight of the fact that it may not be forever and if it’s something you see as a calling, something you truly believe in and see as giving your life meaning long-term, that’s a different story because many people do and they will just continue. But at the same time, I think we recognize, especially over the last couple of years, that life throws a lot of surprises, our way, not all of them are the ones we would like and so, having to be adaptable as becoming incredibly important, it always has been, but I think we’re more aware of how important that is. So, the more you can be thinking ahead, the more you can — when I say planning, by the way, I’m not talking about a strict plan, I’m talking more about a framework, a way of thinking a way of looking for opportunities being open up to opportunities pursuing them in a way that a lot of times you don’t necessarily do when you’re so mired in your current work and the demands and in law, of course those demands are never ending.

J. Craig Williams: All right so I’m getting the sense from what you’re saying that perhaps the best retirement planning is to plan or to think about what it is you want to do, where your passion lies as opposed to a dollar amount to retire to specific age, is that right?

Ida Abbott: Well you need both, I mean you know, the dollar amount, I think if you’re careful when you start doing financially, setting aside some money that’s all very important at the youngest ages, but even as you get older, I just was listening to somebody talking about the economics of retirement. And especially, if you’re thinking as for young people they might as well be thinking in terms of hundred-year lives, if they’re going to be having careers that maybe 50 or 60 years long, then you do have to be thinking about the things that are meaningful to you.

(00:10:27)

But a lot of that will change over time and when you’re younger, you’re going to be making more long-term decisions or planning more long-term as you get older. That timeframe is compressed and so, in order to maximize your options, you want to be open from the very beginning and then as you approach the age, where you do want to cut back and gradually stopped while working in the career you’re in to start thinking about how to design — if you want to keep working, how to design work that would make sense for you whether it’s paying or volunteer work, doing pro bono work, continuing as a lawyer, doing something else because there will be many options available. There are more options available now than most people realize because they don’t need to — they don’t normally think about it. Why would they? There’s, you know, just trying to get through day by day by day.

J. Craig Williams: Well, Ida at this time, we’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors, we’ll be right back.

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And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m joined by Ida Abbott. She is the founder of Ida Abbott Consulting and we’re talking retirement. Well Ida, let’s talk a little bit about, I don’t want to call it forced retirement but what happens in the situation where you’re suddenly disabled and you can’t work as opposed to what happens in this situation where you know, you’re 65, your law firm comes knocking at your door and so you know it’s been great having you, it’s really time for you to head out to the pasture, those are two very different scenarios but how would you handle those?

Ida Abbott: Well, both of them are putting you in a position that isn’t in your control. And so, what you want to do because especially for most of us who are in law, we want to maintain as much control as we can. And if you’re disabled, you are dealing with a lot of very complicated issues other than work. And there may be opportunities for you, there may be choices where you can continue to do some kind of work, depending of course on the nature of the disability, one of the keys in that and basically every situation is having a network, a social network around you of people you can rely on and trust to help you get through it. I think with any trend any significant life transition that becomes one of the most essential elements to help you deal with the situation and the outcomes that, you know, to help you direct as many of the outcomes as possible so that there are as favorable as possible. If the firm is coming to you, then it becomes it may become a matter of negotiation. A lot of times those conversations should happen much earlier than they do and not waiting until somebody comes to you and says it’s time to go, there ought to be ongoing conversations about what are your future plans and if your client base is drying up or your major client retired and the new one, the new general counsel wants to hire a buddy of there’s no matter if, you know, the fact that you may be the world’s leading expert in this field, it doesn’t matter when somebody chooses their friend over you. So if these conversations happen earlier than you can start within the firm building up ways to support partners when it is time to leave, whether it’s their choice or the firm’s choice, but you don’t want to wait and neither of you, neither you nor the firm should wait until the last minute to have that kind of conversation.

(00:15:22)

J. Craig Williams: Do you find that attorneys are sometimes afraid to retire? So you mentioned that, you know, it’s the sitting on the porch and watching the grass grow, kind of attitude. And I think that some attorneys are. But what kind of reactions, since you’re in the business, how do attorneys react to that?

Ida Abbott: Well, retirement transitions are really very difficult and a lot of people have an enormous degree of difficulty adjusting. Lawyers, for many lawyers work is their life purpose. It gives their life purpose, even if it’s not they’re calling, it gives their life structure, it gives them the community, it keeps them intellectually engaged and for many people if they view retirement as the end of all that, they see it only in terms of loss. What I see is then when people have something to retire to, when they are excited because they finally are going to have the time to do to pick up the guitar again or, you know, for most people, it’s traveling because they delayed it but whether it’s traveling or just being with the grandchildren or starting the business that you always wished you had started, whatever it is when you’re looking forward to it, you tend to be much more enthusiastic about going, much less fearful of what’s ahead. When you’ve see it as a time of loss because suddenly you don’t have the purpose, you don’t have clients who depend on you, you don’t have partners who look up to you or a whole community within your firm who looks up to you, a profession that gives you a sense of collegiality and support, even the daily routine that you have will be gone. All of that is associated with loss and when you look at that, of course it’s scary. You’ve never — you’re walking into something without knowing what’s ahead and most lawyers don’t you know, I mean, we all learn, you do trial work, you don’t ask a question, you know, on cross-examine, you don’t know the answer but you would also don’t want to step off the ledge from a fabulous career that’s giving you prestige and status and wealth and everything else into the abyss. So, you know, when that fear is there, it’s understandable. It’s preventable but it’s also understandable.

J. Craig Williams: How do you go about preventing planning?

Ida Abbott: Yeah, I mean you start thinking about the things that you could do and see retirement as a chance to basically call the shots, you get to do what you want to do and you don’t have to do the things you don’t want to do. You can say no without feeling guilty. You can find all kinds of new ways to fill up your days, you can be as busy as you want, you can be as lazy as you want, although I don’t encourage that because that can lead to lot of negative consequences, but you can control the pace of your daily activities of your time that you spend your time on and really find a great deal of pleasure and fulfillment and purpose. But you have to be thinking in that way, you have to be looking for those things you know that’s really where the challenge is to get people to even talk about it. Because so many lawyers, you know, don’t talk to me about this, I’m going to die at my desk and when you have that kind of attitude, it’s very hard because you’re putting a barriers that aren’t going to be very helpful because at some point you may very well die at your desk but that means there may be a lot of a lot of things unfulfilled, a lot of things you leave behind that would have given you a lot of pleasure.

J. Craig Williams: You know, we’ve talked about the differences in the age brackets, but we haven’t talked about the differences in women and men and the challenges that they each face as they near retirement especially now that we have way more female attorneys in the practice than when I first started.

Ida Abbott: Oh sure. And it’s I find it really very interesting because this is it — in my thinking and in my experience in dealing with clients and women that I’ve talked to who are, you know, thinking about retirement. This is one of the first times women find themselves with an advantage.

(00:20:05)

Women have had to redefine themselves throughout their careers. They’ve had to adapt their sense of authenticity not necessarily by changing who they are but in the way they interact with other people and in the world so that they can be accepted as professionals and equals and leaders. So women have had some experience in dealing with identity issues and changes in circumstances where you don’t have a lot of support and you’re having to kind of go out there and figure it out. This is for some men the first time they’ve ever had to deal with issues of who am I? And if I’m not doing this, then who am I in — you know, if I’m not working, who am I, if I’m not a partner in a law firm or if I’m not the general counsel of this organization and so in that sense, women have an advantage, but at the same time, women face far more ageism because so much of our social thinking of and stereotypes around women focus on physical attractiveness and youth, women can be older and gray-haired and not have the negative kind of penalties, socially that women do. Women are not seen in society as leaders. It’s easier for them to become invisible or just feel themselves becoming invisible, but at the same time, you know, as I say, women have had to deal with that before. So they’ve dealt with being with having to prove themselves to people who see them in a way that is incompatible with who they really are. Men, when they see themselves as retired, feel only the negative aspects of that and so many men have difficulty with it.

J. Craig Williams: Ida, we’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors, we’ll be right back.

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J. Craig Williams: And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m joined by Ida Abbott, who is giving us some tips on retirement. Ida, what advice do you have for attorneys out there who are approaching retirement age at the 60 to 65 range or right in there? Is there a particular mantra that you live by?

Ida Abbott: Yeah, stay curious revive your curiosity if you’ve lost it because, you know, part of the danger of being successful as a lawyer is thinking you have answers and being called on to be the expert but retirement is something that’s going to be new, it’s a new status, it’s a new way of living of spending your time and so instead of shutting down or feeling that is a loss and looking backward of what you’re giving up, be curious about what the possibilities are because the world is filled with all sorts of interests, all sorts of things that you can explore and move into and try out. I also encourage people to try things because you know, you can sit and study and come up with lots and lots of listen, I have a tip for that as well but you want to —

J. Craig Williams: Well let us in, let us in in that secret.

Ida Abbott: I will but you want to try things as well. The tip was given to me by a close friend who was actually my doctor and also a close friend. And he retired at 62, I said how come you seem to be so happy and so busy and you’re thriving, what was the secret? And he said when he was young, he started writing down, in those days, it was little pocket notebook you know? He started writing down everything that sounded interest. If he met a patient who did something that he hadn’t thought about or if he was at a party and he talked to somebody and discover that they did or get something or were studying some, or he read an article.

(00:25:09)

And that was something that interested him. He just kept a record of it and he said when I retire and I didn’t have to sit down and think about what I was going to do. I had pages of things that had interested me. And I looked for patterns, and I look for the things that interested me over and over again and if they still interested me, then I went ahead and put them on my to-do-list.

J. Craig Williams: Did he ever publish it?

Ida Abbott: No, no, no, it was just personal but I used — I mean I encouraged it. I’ve got it in my book that I do it in all my work. That’s the first tip I give people is start — keeping a record now because it does make it so much easier to sit down one day and say boy, what are the things that might be interesting to me if I had all the time to do it and you know, how could I make it happen? Sometimes it seems outrageous. You know, I’d like to go in an archaeological dig in the Middle East some place but I also need to do this and I want to help people and I want to do this, you know, you can find ways of combining interest to make them happen even if when you first write them down, they seemed so outlandish or so impossible, but eventually you start looking at these interests and you can find ways to make them happen.

J. Craig Williams: Certainly you can, you can volunteer and get started in that perspective.

Ida Abbott: You can volunteer and teach at the same time, you can live abroad and study abroad. You can at the same time, you can — one of my clients wanted to learn French, she was a litigator and she wanted — she was fascinated by textiles and we came up with the idea of finding a town in France that specialized at a historically vibrant textile of manufacturing community and she could mediate from anywhere in the world. So, you know, you can find ways to pull things together but it requires a little, you know, little creativity, a different way of thinking and getting rid of the things and barriers in your mind, that tell you “you can’t do that.”

J. Craig Williams: Okay, well we followed your advice so far and we’re sitting in our office and now we have to go talk to the boss about retiring. We’ve made up our mind what we’re going to do. We saved enough money. We’re ready, mentally. How do you go talk to your boss and say, look, you know, I’m done, I’m ready to go. How do I transition my clients to you, and how do you pay me for so on and so forth? How do those conversations go?

Ida Abbott: Well, you have to have a plan in your own mind and the better you’ prepared when you walk in for that conversation, the more in control you can be of the conversation. Now, you know, for a lot of lawyers who are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, they’re already the boss, they’re one of the bosses. Sometimes they work for somebody else and they have to go in but even if you’re a partner of huge firm, you still have to have the conversation. So half the time people give up without even realizing they could negotiate the kinds of terms that would be beneficial to them, but would also benefit the firm. I mean, you’ve got interests here, they’re really three interest because the client’s interests are involved as well. So if you have a plan and you want to talk to the firm or the boss about it, you need to be doing this with enough time built into the plan to do the transitions that are going to be necessary. If their personal relationships with clients as most lawyers have, you can’t just walk into the client and say “this is your new lawyer”, the client has to have enough trust not only in your suggestion but in the new person and so there has to be time for that relationship to build and the more complicated the relationship is, the more work that’s involved, the larger the client the levels of complexity also increase and so you need to have plenty of time built-in, as well as a plan that outlines what you expect to do, how you’re going to introduce your designated successors to your clients and before that, how are you going to prepare these people you see as successors, and whether the firm has anything to say about that. But it has to become a discussion and it’s always better for you to walk in with a plan and initiate those conversations than it is to wait until the example you gave a little while ago, if somebody coming in and saying, okay, you’re out of here.

(00:30:05)

So, you know, having that prepared, you need to look at whatever your partnership or your employment agreement is and do all of that background research as well. So that you know what’s feasible and what isn’t and even if it doesn’t sound like it’s feasible, if especially, because it hasn’t been done before that shouldn’t stop you. If it’s a good idea then do it. I just spoke with a lawyer who decided probably in his early 50s he was finished practicing the way he had been and he took a sabbatical and came back and offered to become the firm’s general counsel and to do all of the compliance work and other kinds of work that lawyers will require to do but hated to do. And so he offered to take on more of an administrative role and an oversight role. It had never been done before and the firm said sure, you know, but other people would think about that and say, well, it’s hasn’t been done, it can’t be done. So it’s a matter of really of thinking, whether you want to stay in the firm or you want to leave, you know, what’s going to be possible, how can you make it possible and then be ready to negotiate because there’s some things that may not be agreeable to everybody.

J. Craig Williams: Let’s talk briefly about small law firms and solo practitioners about how they transition themselves into retirement.

Ida Abbott: Well you know, they don’t have as many people to choose from or as many people to cover for them. They have to be thinking about what they’re going to do with their practice and that may mean you know, very few people want to just close up the practice and leave. Most want to especially if they have clients whose are going to continue to need services, they’re going to want something to continue. So you have to start looking at the value of your firm, probably talking to somebody because most people don’t really understand the value of their firm and how to maximize that to put it in the best position to then transfer it whether you transferred internally to partners or associates or other people. Whether you’re going to sell to further practice to another firm or merge with them and be absorbed by them acquired. You need to start looking at the options and there aren’t that many resources out there but there are a growing number of them people who do that kind of work to help people with smaller firms and solo practices and then making sure that everything is in order because you know, for most people, most some lawyers don’t care but what happens when they leave but I think those that’s really a very small minority, I think most lawyers care both because of their clients and because of their legacy they have built up a huge amount of trust and status over their career. And they don’t want to just leave that behind, they’d like to make sure that it is positive, it’s something that they can be proud of and that other people will remember them by — will remember them in a positive way.

J. Craig Williams: Sound advice. Well, Ida it looks like we’ve reached the end of our program so it’s appropriate now to ask you to give you your final thoughts and your contact information.

Ida Abbott: Well, my final thoughts, I guess would go back to the tips that I mentioned earlier to start maintaining a list, to start building that list, talking to other people and building up some support. People who have already retired, people who are also may be thinking about it, definitely talking to a spouse if you have a spouse or a partner because they’re going to hopefully go through it with you and so getting them involved is important. And as I say to be curious to keep that — build that curiosity muscle so that you look at everything out there to see what are the possibilities for me and how do I find even more and then to try things out. So I guess that’s plenty to work with and people can reach me at [email protected].  That’s I-D-A A-B-B-O-T-T, dotcom.

J. Craig Williams: Wonderful. As we wrap, I’d like to thank our guests, Ida Abbott for joining us today, it has been a pleasure having you on the show.

Ida Abbott: Well thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be here with you.

J. Craig Williams: I guess, few of my thoughts of today’s topic. I’ve always encouraged younger attorneys to save as much out of their paycheck as they can at least 10%, now I’ve seen estimates upwards of 25% and perhaps even more as Ida points out that if you’re only going to work 30 or 40 years and then want to retire for 30 or 40 years, you’re going to need a lot of money or a different life style.

(00:35:07)

So planning seems to be Ida’s mantra and I think it’s a good one. Planning young, planning old, plan for what you want to do. There’s some wonderful books out there I would strongly encourage you to look at, What Color is Your Parachute, it’s a fantastic book for finding out what your passions are and determining where your life might want to go. Well with that recommendation, that’s it for Craig’s little rant on this topic, and if you’re really listening, it’s not really a rant but there you are. Let me know what you think about it, send me an email and if you’ve like what you’ve heard today, please rate us on Apple podcast, your favorite podcasting app, you can also visit us on legaltalknetwork.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m Craig Williams, thanks for listening, please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember, when you want legal, think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

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