Mandatory Retirement: Idiocy or Atrocity?

In general, I try to avoid staking out hard and fast positions.  Partly, this is simply because I have a strong preference for spending my time analyzing and discussing issues where there really are two (or more) sides; they're just plain more intrinsically interesting than those where the right, or the only feasible, option, is drop-dead obvious.  I gravitate towards the grey over the black and white, towards the nuance over the sound-bite (one reason among countless others I could never be a politician).

Today I'm breaking this rule.

The business section of today's New York Times front-paged an article discussing mandatory retirement ages at large law firms, and noted an Altman-Weil survey that found about three out of five firms had such policies.

Now, we always knew such policies existed, but for them to be in the majority of firms strikes me as barely this side of outrageous.    Before elaborating on that view, let me rehearse the reasons defenders of mandatory retirement advance:

• We need to pay younger partners handsomely, there's only so much money to go around, and so we have to cut off senior partners.
• We need to make room for younger partners to take over client relationships.
• Beyond a certain point, senior partners are markedly less productive.

Re: Pay    Let me draft into service as a spokesman for this position one John C. Hendrickson, the regional lawyer for the E.E.O.C. in Chicago, who's spearheading that agency's notorious case against Sidley Austin on behalf of 32 former partners demoted or forced to retire in 1999 because, as the E.E.O.C. contends, of age discrimination:  "I think as the legal profession has become more like a business, the younger people who are coming up are more anxious to get a bigger piece of the pie and the way to do that is to get rid of the elders."

This is fallacious on so many levels one hesitates before the embarrassment of riches, but let's be kind and keep it brief:

• Now that firms operate "more like a business," my personal reaction is to sound the trumpets of long overdue praise, but my second observation is that that implies, and Mr. Hendrickson presumably would concur, that they are more profitable, not less.  In other words, there's more to go around, not less.  If yesterday's obsolete, inefficient firms could afford to keep "the elders" around, why cannot today's sleeker, richer firms?
• If the younger want "a bigger piece of the pie," that doesn't mean the older have to be shoved rudely away from the table and onto the floor.  They might even be happy to take the same size piece they got last year given that the pie has grown.
• Since when have "the younger people" not been "anxious?"

Re:  Passing Clients Along  From time immemorial, or more accurately since the late 19th Century, large law firms have enjoyed institutional clients with generations passing the baton on both sides of the table, firm-side and client-side.  We humans understand this viscerally:  There are the up-and-comers, the rock solid mid-career performers you can count on for responsivenss and flawless execution, the wiser and more sagacious seniors who can distill a career's worth of experience, and lastly the true elder statesmen.   Lawyers understand this; clients understand this.  No individual relationship is forever, but for firms to unilaterally and, I might add, somewhat brutally, sever this relationship before its time is an unnatural act that serves no one's interest and which most clients, if administered truth serum, would probably confess they find baffling, inhumane, and just plain odd.

Re:  Underperforming  The very very short answer to this one is that we know how to deal with underperformance, be it at age 25 or age 75.  And if you don't, we need to have an extended conversation about a lot more than mandatory retirement.  If this is the pretext, your firm is using a grossly blunt instrument to deal with a problem it evidently refuses to face more directly.

So much for the defenses advanced to support mandatory retirement.  More interestingly, what are the reasons for doing away with mandatory retirement?

• You've bought and paid for this wisdom; now's the time to get the most of it.  The young, jejune, and energetic have their own virtues; the older, seasoned, and reflective have theirs as well.  Your firm needs both. 
• If your firm posits that no one has any value past (say) 65, I will posit that no one has any idea what they're really doing until (say) age 30.  Can you imagine a policy against hiring anyone under 30?  Then why does the over-65 make sense?
• Older partners can serve other functions and perform in other roles than they did when they were 35, 45, or 55.  They can mentor, train, help transition client relationships to younger people, operate as ambassadors for the firm to important constituencies (lateral recruits, potential merger partners, law schools, even governmental and regulatory agencies).   They can, in other words, "dial back" while still providing valuable service to the firm—service you might not want to sacrifice the high-priced billable hours of others to perform.
• We all trumpet our invaluable "cultures."  I have news for you:  There is no more powerful cultural transmission mechanism on earth than the personally imparted wisdom of elders.  They've seen it all, and they basically don't give a damn.  So they call a spade a spade.  (I'm assuming you like your culture and want it transmitted onwards.)

Finally, there's the simple inhumanity of mandatory retirement.  You are taking people presumably about as wise as they're ever going to be, and kicking them overboard when the arbitrarily set alarm clock goes off.  Does this make sense?  Is it good business?  Does it help your clients?  Does it make your firm provide wiser counsel?  And most important:  Is it any way to treat someone who has presumably more or less devoted their career to you?