Jeff Gray of The Globe and Mail recently reported that ex-premier Bill Davis is going to practise law at the family firm, Davis Webb LLP of Brampton, Ont. Davis would get bored if he put his feet up, he said. He’s only 80, after all.
Is Davis leading a trend? Will senior lawyers stay in practice forever while younger practitioners pine away for lack of opportunity? Gray quotes a few youthful doomsayers who fear it’s true.
I doubt it. The situation for young lawyers is probably as good today as it’s ever been.
There was a time when seniority used to hold nearly absolute sway in law firm hierarchies.
“You may be more valuable, but I am older,” a senior partner at Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP told Allan Graydon when he sought a larger partnership share in the 1930s.
Memoirs of the mid-20th century at many law firms spin lurid tales of elderly, unproductive, and alcoholic senior partners controlling the files while appropriating most of the profits and making all of the decisions.
Look at who used to lead the biggest law firms. Fifty years ago, the handful of partners who owned those firms tended to stay on forever. Beverley Matthews was just beginning to hand over power at McCarthys in 1980 when he was 75.
At Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, his contemporary Hal Mockridge stayed just as long at the firm. In 1990, Fraser Elliott was hitting 70 when he began to step back from leadership at Stikeman Elliott LLP. Those guys wielded real power over client relationships and allocations at their firms.
Compare the leaders in the same firms today. After two terms as CEO of McCarthy Tétrault LLP, Iain Scott recently stepped down in his mid-50s and made way for the even younger Marc-André Blanchard to take the helm. Chairs and managing partners at other firms are of the same generation.
There are fewer greybeards leading major firms now, and leadership tenures are generally shorter, too.
What killed the rule of seniority was competition. As the market for legal services heated up in the latter part of the 20th century, the absolute rule of elderly lawyer-proprietors became something law firms could no longer afford.
It’s been the same story at the Law Society of Upper Canada. The average age of benchers was once in the high 60s, and treasurers used to be elected in their 80s. It’s true that the incumbency advantage still enables elected benchers to stay quite a while, but their average age has dropped sharply in recent decades. Now they’re talking about term limits, too.
There’s no doubt that the boomer cohort of lawyers is creating a bulge in the senior ranks these days; it’s the same in every nearly field. Still, it’s worth remembering that the now-dominant boomers faced at least as grim a situation when they were starting out.
The enlarged and more diverse graduating classes of new lawyers in the 1970s hardly found the path to the top open to them.
Legal scholar Richard Abel described the situation in 1986 as “a very small cohort of elderly white men [governing] a very large younger cohort with significant female and minority membership.” That generational conflict was stormier than the one looming today.
The boomers did have good fortune in one respect. Their careers matured in a period when Canadian law firms, once very closely controlled, began to admit associates very rapidly into partnership.
In recent decades, a one-to-one ratio of associates to partners has become common in Canadian law firms. Promotion to partnership became an expectation after five to seven years.
That ratio is about to be another casualty of competition. American and European global law firms, the competitors of the big Canadian firms, often have four associates to every partner. In some cases, they are leaner and more efficient as a result, and I believe Canadian firms are sure to imitate them.
It’s not because of a few Bill Davises hanging on into their 80s that the current crop of associates will have to fight for corner offices; it’s the changed nature of the legal market.
Law is still a profession where experience counts for something, of course. I know of at least two 1950 calls - and that’s after wartime military service - who still show up at their respective offices pretty regularly.
But they’re not running the firms or keeping files away from ambitious associates. Davis won’t be either.
Christopher Moore’s newest book, The British Columbia Court of Appeal: The First Hundred Years, is published this month. His web site is
www.christophermoore.ca.
