When Irwin Hamilton, a sole real estate practitioner in an east central Ontario town, decided four years ago that he wanted to retire, he didn’t just close the door of his practice and transfer his files. Instead, he made a five-year plan, recognizing the importance of a gradual transition to retirement. 

“It is not easy to retire, to let go of the contacts and knowledge you’ve built up, he said. But Hamilton, now sixty, says “ I realized I was not exempt from the aging process and wanted to retire while I was in high demand.”

According to Statistics Canada, there are 7.2 million Canadians between the ages of 45 and 59 — and they’ll all be thinking about retirement within the next ten to fifteen years. Planning — for both finances and lifestyle — is crucial to ensure an emotionally satisfying and prosperous exit from the workforce.

Hamilton’s solution for an orderly retirement was to bring another lawyer in to train to replace him as he gradually phased himself out of the practice. He remained in the office for the first year or so after the new lawyer came on board, but decided it would be fairer to his replacement if he wasn’t on-site all the time. 

Now, he lives in both Squamish and Kelowna, B.C., and works remotely by telephone and Internet, answering questions for the Bowmanville, Ont.-based office.

Technology provides him the opportunity to live the retirement lifestyle he wants, but also allows him to stay connected to the firm and pass on his knowledge from a distance. He says it is working well, but cautions lawyers that when you are thinking about retirement, it is no time to have an ego. 

“You have to recognize that you must give the replacement lawyer responsibility for your files and the opportunity to achieve the income that goes with it — you can’t be jealous. You have to be okay with becoming more and more of a bystander as your replacement learns your job.”

Lisa Vogt, regional managing partner of McCarthy Tétrault in Vancouver, said that the principal issues of importance to any firm are managing client relationships and transitioning clients to other members of the team. She said that her firm recognizes that an abrupt retirement is hard on both the lawyer and the firm.  Her firm has a mandatory retirement age of 65, and she said “we have the managing partner initiate discussions about retirement and personal planning to manage the transition several years in advance.” 
She agreed that one of the biggest issues for upcoming partner retirement is encouraging the partner to relinquish responsibility and allowing other members of the team to have a bigger role — especially if income will be affected.  

Vogt said: “Lawyers must start thinking about retirement when they are juniors in their thirties. It’s part of taking ownership of their careers.”

She noted that every few years McCarthy Tétrault have a consultant come in to give seminars on retirement planning, not just for the older lawyers in the firm, but for all of their lawyers.

Barry LaValley, a retirement consultant in British Columbia and the founder of The Retirement Lifestyle Center, is a leading educator and authority on the lifestyle transition to retirement. He said that, surprisingly, the lawyers who don’t have a successful transition are the ones who think it’s all about how much money they will need to live on.

In fact, there are many other considerations that are just as important as money. Lawyers should create a retirement plan, he says, that includes the goals that the retiring lawyer wants to achieve in six different areas: health, family, work or volunteering, leisure time, home and finances.

LaValley said that lawyers have special issues when it comes to retirement. Lawyers are especially competitive and are used to having their days structured into six minute increments — a combination that  can lead to a lawyer being driven to pursue his retirement with the same zeal as his career.

“That’s why some lawyers end up playing golf 300 days a year — they are either 150 percent in work mode or 150 percent in leisure mode.”

He suggested that lawyers ease their workload before retirement to help them achieve work/life balance and begin to strengthen their interpersonal relationships — especially if the lawyer has derived most of his or her social networking from the firm. 

He said that lawyers often look longingly at retirement as a salvation from the long hours and stress of their jobs, but fail to realize that leisure time only has value when it is an escape from something else.

LaValley said the way to avoid the pitfall of becoming a retirement zealot is to gradually transition out of the practice, to give yourself time to discover who you are besides a lawyer. 

“Self-actualization is very important for lawyers, for whom everything is always a competition,” he said.
“That doesn’t change when lawyers retire. We continue to fall back on behaviours and personality traits that made us successful when we were younger,” he said.

Because lawyers derive their self-image from reaching and achieving goals, lawyers often thrive on goal-oriented hobbies, such as, going back to school or taking up sports where they can try to better their own scores. 

The challenge for lawyers, LaValley said, is in finding replacements for some of the need for competition and goal achievement that will no longer be met in the practice of law.

The bottom line: you must make sure you are retiring “to” something and not just “from” something, he stressed.