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What appears to be senior lawyers fading from the profession may have less to do with losing their edge than with a profession that continues to measure value in ways that fail to capture the contribution of experience, according to a former big four auditor and recruiter.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show, Sean Spence, the director of Sean Spence & Associates, challenged the perception that senior lawyers simply lose motivation later in their careers, arguing instead that the profession often fails to recognise the evolving value that experienced practitioners bring.
Rather than losing their drive, Spence suggested that many senior lawyers are navigating a shift in priorities, where their greatest contributions increasingly move beyond traditional measures of performance.
“Well, I think there are a couple of things. One is the emphasis on transactions, billable hours, revenue, and so on,” he said.
“At 60, there are actually quite a lot of physiological and psychological changes that genuinely happen to us as human beings.
“But the design of work in law, and its matter-driven nature of the work, means that it’s hard to actually reflect on that and integrate that into how the firm works.”
Rather than signalling the end of a legal career, he argued that many senior lawyers are simply redefining their priorities as they move through different stages of life.
“It’s not necessarily that one’s fading totally from life, but it may be that it’s becoming clear that some other things are becoming more important,” he said.
As personal and professional priorities evolve, Spence explained that many senior lawyers naturally begin shifting their focus away from individual achievement and towards creating impact through mentoring, coaching, and developing others.
“Personal life is more complex. But there is a thing that’s hard to put your finger on, but you start to see things differently,” he said.
“There’s a notion in Erik Erikson’s work of human development around generativity, which essentially means that you start becoming more interested in how other people are succeeding rather than yourself. That’s when it becomes natural to feel like you want to coach and mentor people.”
However, Spence warned that this shift can create tension within a profession still largely structured around measurable outputs, with some of the most valuable contributions senior lawyers make often falling outside traditional performance metrics.
“That can be high impact, but doesn’t produce much of a billable hour. So there’s this clash between the structure of work and the way your rhythm is actually changing,” he said.
Spence argued that the value of senior lawyers rarely lies in working longer hours or producing more work, but in the wisdom to identify patterns others miss and guide teams towards better solutions, contributions that are often overlooked in a profession driven by billable hours.
“I think you start to see patterns differently,” he said.
“So wisdom looks like somebody coming into the room where a complex problem is not quite being resolved, putting their finger on it and leaving in 15 minutes with the entire room shifted towards a better resolution of the problem, and again, not much of a billable hour in that.
“It’s about contribution shifting in a way that’s not always well measured.”
Beyond changing motivations and priorities, Spence also highlighted the cumulative impact of decades spent in one of the most demanding professional environments, suggesting that fatigue can play a significant role in why some experienced lawyers begin to step back from practice.
“Well, I think one of the things about the relentlessness of professional service firm and lawyer work is it’s just fatiguing. And I’ve often wondered why the notion of recovery isn’t built into the way in which we design work,” he said.
