Old Lady Lawyer: The Battle Of The Ages

Older lawyers and younger lawyers have a lot to teach each other -- but are the two groups willing to cooperate? That's the topic to be tackled by our newest columnist, Jill Switzer.

Ed. note: It’s not the battle of the sexes, but the battle of the ages, between the graying of the legal profession and those lawyers not yet eligible for Medicare or even an AARP membership. Can they co-exist in the legal world’s new normal? Please welcome our newest columnist, Jill Switzer.

As I stride ever closer to forty years in the practice of law (and, yes, let’s get out of the way for snark purposes the fact that I graduated from a law school that is in the bottom tier and tiers didn’t really exist back then but 49 out of the 50 of us passed the California Bar exam on the first try), the profession, or should I call it a business now, has changed so much that it’s almost unrecognizable to those of us who have many, many years of practice.

While I was in law school, the United States Supreme Court decided Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, which allowed attorney advertising. What an equally foreign and disdainful concept in those days! The idea of an attorney advertising his/her services was beyond the pale. No self-respecting attorney would ever think to do that, and now it’s not only accepted, but one of the most prevalent ways of getting business. Yelp, Avvo, and a panoply of other sites can and do rate attorneys, and their ratings are often the top hits for searches of a given attorney’s name. (Whether those ratings are accurate or useful to a prospective client is another kettle of fish altogether.)

Then there’s the concept of the practice of law as a business. Another strange idea back then. Lawyers were professionals; they practiced a learned profession, not a retail business. However, as the years went by and the profession morphed from that into a business, in many ways the profession is now nothing more than a trade association and lawyers are retailers. Clients can and often do choose lawyers in the same way they’ll pick a dry cleaner, a plumber, a physician, or any other service provider.

There’s also technology. I once asked a young lawyer if he could imagine practicing law in a world without the Internet, laptops, printers, scanners, emails, word processing and other software, fax machines (does anyone still use them?), overnight delivery services, and other tools that lawyers now take for granted. He paused for a moment, looked up from his smartphone, gave me a “No,” and resumed his texting. Old lawyers remember carbon paper, products that whited out typos, primitive word processing machines (among them Wang, not Wango Tango), and recall with great fondness that old favorite IBM Selectric typewriter. So stipulated that I am OTH (over the hill) agewise.

Ah, yes, the good old days, looked at nostalgically by one whom some would say ought to hang it up, sip pina coladas in Boca Raton or wherever, and disengage from the profession so that the next generation of lawyers can get their share of business. And there lies the rub: the lawyers of my generation can’t or don’t want to hang up their shingles.

Let’s put aside for a moment the issue of competency, i.e., do the brain cells still fire sufficiently to represent clients effectively and to the best of a lawyer’s ability? We can save that discussion for another column. Let’s talk instead about lawyers who still have all their marbles, who want to use their brains for things other than bridge or golf, and not just dedicate themselves to admirable pro bono work. Who gets the work? How to slice that ever-decreasing size of the pie?

Sponsored

In the old days (and I have the five-digit California bar number to prove it), the thought was that if a lawyer did good work and served the clients well, there would always be a place for that lawyer. Someone had to do the work (the service lawyers), while others brought in business (the rainmakers), but there was room enough for everyone.

Those days are long gone. The term “beauty contest” used to mean exactly that: contestants for Miss Universe, Miss America, strutting their stuff down runways. Now, in the legal community, it means strutting their stuff by vying for business, selling the firm, be it a solo practice or an Am Law 100 firm, as the best to handle a particular matter. (I was in-house for many years, so I judged those contests. It was often more a matter of courtesy, rather than merit, to have firms pitch business, as we already knew where the business was going. If my client got sued, we would receive lots of emails from firms saying “choose us, choose us.”)

Today, both oldster and youngster lawyers are battling for the same slice of the shrinking pie, especially now that there are other resources for clients. Yes, I’m looking at you, LegalZoom. There have to be ways for these age groups to co-exist and work together to serve clients. Is it mentoring? Co-counselling on cases? Succession planning?

I know many lawyers who say that they’ll be carried out of their offices feet first. All well and good if they are not sole practitioners. If they are, however, where do those clients of that dead solo go if there’s no handoff?

Regardless of years of practice, there are things that older lawyers and younger lawyers can learn from each other. Older lawyers can impart judgment, wisdom, common sense and the ability to tell younger lawyers how to separate the wheat from the chaff in matters and, even more importantly, how to make good decisions about taking on clients. Younger lawyers can show older lawyers the value of technology and social media, how to handle e-discovery, how to research online (instead of flipping through those musty old law books), and other things that didn’t even exist when the old folks started practicing. Are the two groups willing to do that? That’s the question.

Sponsored


Jill Switzer is closing in on 40 (not a typo) years as a active member of the State Bar of California. Yes, folks, California, that state west of the Sierra Nevada, which everyone likes to diss. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see old lawyers, young lawyers, and those in-between interact — it’s not always pretty. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.