It took a devastating personal tragedy – the death of one of my children – to get me thinking about the mechanics of retirement. Before that horrific event, I never thought about retirement. I saved for it, but I didn’t think about when it might happen. I was at the pinnacle of my field and the height of my earning years. I wasn’t considering when to stop.
My goal was for all my clients to forget about me.
But rites of passage, particularly shocking and tragic ones like the death of a child, force us to think about the future. I became acutely aware of my own mortality and how quickly life can change. Where my vision into the future had been a blur, it was now in sharp focus. It took a catastrophic loss to prompt me to consider what the rest of my life might look like and to begin planning for my eventual exit from the practice of law.
My chief concern was to guarantee my clients' service continuity and excellence. To accomplish this, I needed to get the lawyers who worked for me ready to take over my client relationships. I realized that I had to begin grooming my successors years before I prepared a formal retirement succession plan to submit to my firm, and years before I began talking with my clients about my retirement.
...I identified the younger partners at my firm who would qualify to take over my client relationships
So that’s what I did.
About five years before I retired, I identified the younger partners at my firm who, with the proper acclimation, would qualify to take over my client relationships. I sat down and talked with each one about my plans and their careers. They were enthusiastic. They were working hard to build their own client lists and understood that inheriting my client relationships would be a big boost to their careers.
My firm considered the final two years of a partner’s career to be the period for transitioning clients to the next generation.
At the start of this period, I drafted a retirement succession plan that:
- identified, as to each client, the team of younger lawyers I proposed as successors,
- detailed the precise steps I would take over the next two years to transfer each relationship, and
- provided a timeline for specific tasks to be done during the transition.
I then met with my major clients, bringing my designated successor partners with me, and proposed a plan for providing uninterrupted service after my exit.
By the time these meetings took place, my clients already knew and trusted almost all of these partners, because I had integrated them into the service relationships and given them a seat at the table.
For a few clients, I did not have a junior partner with the subject matter expertise required to meet their unique needs. My firm hired an excellent lateral partner to step into this role. For the most part however, the lawyers I proposed to my clients as my successors were well-positioned to deliver uninterrupted service because they were already integrated into the client relationships.
...my clients already knew and trusted almost all of these partners, because I had given them a seat at the table
Thereafter, throughout my two-year transition period, I submitted to my firm’s management monthly reports documenting the status and completion of each task set out in my retirement succession plan. Over time, as these tasks were completed, I gradually receded into the background of client relationships so my partners could take the lead. My goal was for all my clients to forget about me.
It worked.
By meticulous attention to detail, my team and I succeeded in transitioning every one of my major client relationships – my entire $6 million book of business – to the next generation of partners.
Now I help law firms accomplish the same outcome by sharing the strategies I used to transition my practice, from the creation of customized retirement succession plans to the concrete steps necessary to complete relationship transfers.
My formula is tested, proven, and scalable. The “why” of retirement succession is simple. My work, in the wake of successfully executing my own succession plan, is about the “how.”
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A former senior partner with Am Law 100 firm Barnes & Thornburg, David Wood retired after a 38-year career as a trial lawyer representing large corporate clients. In his final two years of practice, he spent hundreds of hours migrating his $6 million book of business to younger partners. He now works as a business development and succession consultant to law firms, training and coaching lawyers at all levels to do what he did: Build productive, sticky client relationships that stay with the firm when senior partners retire. He can be reached at David.Wood@davidwoodconsulting.com.
