The demographic bulge known as the baby boom generation is moving toward the tail, as they say, like a pig swallowed by a python. Baby boomers are distant memories in the world of sports, mostly fading shadows in music and fighting a rear guard battle in academia.
Not so in the legal trade. The age distribution chart of Minnesota State Bar Association Members has its own bulge in the 52-58 range, and 58 is the single most common age for a state bar member.
How do older lawyers think about their careers as they navigate their way through the late-stages?
"There is not a lot of discussion about how people are planning their lives at that stage. I call it playing the back nine," says trial lawyer Cliff Greene of Greene Espel. "It is a lot easier in many ways to plan your career when you have just graduated law school or just made partner or become assistant general counsel. Where are the role models, and what are the appropriate options?"
Leonard, Street and Deinard partner Alan Saeks, 75, from his lake cabin, is happy to comment. "Let me tell you some history," he says, "that will bear on that subject."
Both Deinard brothers were there when he joined the firm in 1960, Saeks says, and he remembers them well. "They were inseparable," he says. "Amos was blind from age seven. Benedict had read to him through law school, and beyond."
As Saeks recalls, Amos lived in Kenwood Park, Ben lived in Golden Valley. Most mornings Ben would walk to his brother's house in Kenwood, and they would both walk downtown to work, winter or summer. Amos didn't use a cane, he smoked a pipe, and often he shook hands with people without hesitation.
"Many times clients did not know he couldn't see until maybe a second meeting," Saeks says. "His eyes appeared to be normal. But he had a photographic memory and he would do the most complicated business transactions in his head. He was known as one of the brightest most successful lawyers in the community, over a period starting in 1922 when he started at the firm, but especially as he got older.
"But it was his brother Ben, the trial lawyer, who I mainly worked with. He had already made a name for himself as one of the few civilian lawyers who prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials. He prosecuted Krupp, and he got a conviction.
"Amos Deinard," says Saeks, "worked in the firm until he died, age 88 or so. Ben lived to age 68 or 69, and he was arguing cases right up to the end."
Saeks also recalls attorney George Leonard. He was deceased by the time Saeks joined the firm, but his story was well known. "He was a key supporter of Floyd B. Olson and represented a lot of people fighting the big banks, and so on. He lived until age 92 and worked right to the end.
"That is sort of a long way of answering your questions. At 55 or 60 I never even thought of retirement. Now I am 76. I don't need the money. I get a lot of satisfaction out of what I am doing, and so I am still doing it."
Moving from a law firm to a judgeship is one way to top off a career, but sometimes it happens the other way around. Sam Hanson, now 69, is a shareholder in Briggs and Morgan. He returned to the firm at the age of 68, after seven years on the bench, two as a state appeals court judge and five years on the state supreme court. The explanation is simple, he says. In another year, he would have faced mandatory retirement.
"It's not a career path you could recommend to people exactly. It depends on a lot of chance and opportunity coming at the right moment. For me it worked out very well."
Now, as a senior litigator, he says he can't help seeing disputes through the eyes of a judge. "If the intermural scraps between lawyers spill over when they walk into the courtroom, it is a negative," he says.
Hanson cites two judges who also returned to private practice as models for his late career: Former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Robert Sheran (whom Hanson clerked for when he was fresh out of law school) and Peter Popovich, who went from being Supreme Court Chief Justice to Hanson's firm, Briggs and Morgan.
The concept of a late-stage mentor doesn't resonate with Gregg Corwin, of Gregg M. Corwin & Associates Law Office.
"As you get older, you're the mentor," he says. "And you get mellower. You don't obsess over things as much. You just get them done. When you are younger you tend to react more emotionally, and sometimes more personally."
Corwin, who is 61, was admitted to practice in 1972. "My practice is exactly the same now as it's been most of my career," Corwin says. "Labor and employment law on the labor side."
That practice has changed a lot, Corwin says. "Everything is more hostile, more litigious. The attorneys are not as collegial. And you don't have the same relationship with the judges. There are too many of them, and they are too busy. People are fighting more and harder, and settlements are more difficult."
"My response to the late career challenge," says Twin Cities litigator Linda Holstein, Holstein Kremer, "was that I started my own law firm. That was January 2006.
"For a lot of trial lawyers and litigators, the mentor they originally started with is always their mentor," Holstein says. "[For me,] It was Vance Opperman, actually. I still think about how he did things."
But Holstein considers her partner, Anh Le Kremer, now just 32 years old, as a mentor of sorts, "in the reverse fashion." Technology was part of that dynamic.
"When we started the new firm, the first thing Anh said was that we were going to go paperless. I said, 'I don't understand.' She said, 'You understand, but you just don't want to do it.'" Kremer was also a big influence on the decision to start the firm in the first place, Holstein says.
"The fault lines for 'maturity' in law careers have never been real onerous to me," Holstein says. "I was a high school English teacher and theater director for 10 years before I went to law school. I always identified with lawyers who were 10 years younger than me because those are the people I went to law school with."
That has also made Holstein a skeptic with regard to any supposed "loss of civility" in the legal profession.
"These men from the early generation, and it's always men, who are telling you how civil it used to be-there weren't very many of them," she says. "By and large they were white and by and large they had wives at home. Now we have a hugely diverse group, some of whom are women with husbands at home taking care of the kids. This is an amazing change for some of these older attorneys."
For Scott Borene, age 59, the practice has changed a lot recently, but not, he says, because of any mid-life changes or "navel-gazing."
He says it's purely a function of changes in his practice area, immigration law. "I've been working more Saturdays and Sundays in the last year than I have in my entire career," says Borene, principal in the law firm Borene Law Firm's immigration law group.
Borene still handles some of what he calls family-based cases, with workers skilled and unskilled from Latin America, but most of his clients in recent years have been highly skilled professionals, or the companies that employ them or would like to.
"I guess it keeps me employed, so I shouldn't complain. But it's irritating compared to 25 years ago." he says. "This is a terrible system. It's like the Internal Revenue Code. It's not based on fairness. It's not based on national self-interest. It's a chaotic hodgepodge that's accumulated over a hundred-plus years of different congresses, and there is a political explanation for every single provision in it."
"This has been going on since before I was born. The United States is fundamentally schizophrenic on immigration. On the one hand, it's a nation of immigrants, and we love them. On the other hand, there is a nativist strain in the United States, and it typically appears in times of economic or other types of social distress, and it leads to scapegoating and bad policies."
"I have to go," he says, "I have a client call." L&P
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