From the Editor

By Martin Lasden
     
The aging of the baby boom generation portends big changes for the legal profession. In fact, according to the American Bar Association, a full quarter of the nation's lawyers, now numbering 1.1 million, will be 65 or older by 2011.
      Exactly how painful will this aging process get? Legal editor Barbara Kate Repa pondered this question while reporting on the mandatory retirement policies of large law firms ("Rethinking Mandatory Retirement, page 20). For the article, she interviewed roughly 40 partners from more than 20 law firms, who ranged in age from 40 to 70 (all were male). "When I asked them whether they had given any thought to retirement," she recalls, "to a man they said no. They gave all sorts of reasons, such as 'I still love the law,' or 'That's not something that I have any time to think about,' or 'My wife doesn't want me around the house.'
      "There's a lot of denial going on out there," Repa adds. "The revolution that lies ahead for these lawyers is as much psychological as anything else."
      As Repa reports, last month Sidley Austin?a 1,700-lawyer law firm with offices on four continents?agreed to pay 32 of its former partners $27.5 million in a federal age-bias suit filed two years ago by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (A key question was whether lawyers, as partners and shareholders, enjoy the same protections provided to employees under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.) The closely watched case, which Repa examines in her piece, is likely to have a profound effect on how law firms treat their older partners.
      This issue also marks the promotion of Chuleenan Svetvilas as our new managing editor. Svetvilas came to this magazine three and a half years ago as a senior editor. Her duties have included supervising both the CLAY Awards and our annual law firm survey?tasks that allowed her to demonstrate both her keen judgment and organizational skills. Now, with her new assignment, we will be able to more fully utilize her talents.


     

---