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I have some exciting news and resources to share with you. Mentoring and sponsorship remain a major focus of my practice, especially as a process to promote diversity and inclusion, career advancement, and professional growth and development. But I have expanded my focus to help individuals define and design the retirement they want, and to help firms improve their partner succession and retirement processes. In connection with this work, I have been producing various programs and resources, including a new book, Retirement by Design, that will be published early next year and is described in more detail below.

I also want to share several webinars, videos and podcasts about retirement, mentoring and sponsorship, as well as a “lesson” that appeared in a recently published book. They are described, and links are provided, below. I hope you find them useful.

If I can be of help to you as a retirement coach; if you are looking for a speaker on retirement issues, mentoring or sponsorship; or if you would like to learn more about my consulting services in any of these areas, please get in touch with me.

New Book: Retirement by Design

The old notion of retirement as a retreat and disengagement is obsolete. People are living longer, healthier lives, and they are staying active and productive for decades past the standard “retirement age” of 62. That particular age was chosen for policy reasons when Social Security was enacted (originally the age was…

Video recordings of the presentations from the 2018 National Legal Mentoring Consortium, including my presentation on Mentoring to Support Diversity and Inclusiveness with Kori Carew and Mark Palmer, are available to the public. You can watch our presentation here.

We need to rethink retirement. The common concept of retirement is loaded with negative implications. It suggests withdrawal from work and meaningful activity, and evokes images of doddering old people whose lives are marked by irrelevance, boredom or senility. It’s no wonder lawyers dread the prospect of retirement. Senior partners have spent decades as leaders, rainmakers and trusted advisors. They have no interest in riding off into the sunset or having all they have built come to an end. Yet retirement can also be seen as a gift: a chance to shift gears, explore interests, or pursue adventures that have long been deferred. We need to re-frame the idea of retirement so that senior partners who would like to retire but feel too threatened, embarrassed or unable to imagine what else they could do will embrace the future with eagerness and excitement.

Retirement allows you to make choices about what you want to do in the future without regard to billable hours, demands from others, new technologies or office politics. At a certain point in your career, it is important to consider what you will do next and when you will start. Whether it’s at age 55 or 75, only you can know what that point is.

It is most desirable to enter retirement when you are mentally, physically and financially sound. Life is messy, though; unexpected things happen and people find themselves pushed into retirement earlier than expected. So, it’s…