Immortality in Law and Life

Published October 28, 2014

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying,” said Woody Allen.

Alas, many lawyers seem to want to achieve immortality through both avenues: they want to keep working because their work is their identity; and they keep working because they ignore their own mortality, risking, in effect, their very immortality by not planning to sell their law practice.

A prospective client who is seventy-three years of age and still practicing recently contacted me. He was told to do so by the lawyer who created his family trust, but he wasn’t quite sure why.

Together, the client and I looked at the client’s situation from the perspective of the family trust lawyer. From that vantage point, it was clear that the family trust lawyer wanted to make sure that my prospective client’s entire wealth was properly protected; this lawyer was making sure that he was not guilty of malpractice in failing to address the entire picture for the client.

We then looked at my prospective client’s situation from the perspective of his wife. She had encouraged him-in fact, insisted-that he follow the advice of the family trust lawyer in contacting me. She was intent on having her husband monetize his law practice before he died. And she was rightly concerned that if he failed to address this issue, he would leave her a mess, one with little or no value. It’s tough enough to deal with the grief of losing a loved one; it’s worse if you also have to address issues of closing his/her business when you were not involved in it.

My prospective client and I then looked at his situation from his perspective. He wanted to continue to practice law and had no desire to sell the practice. Bluntly but honestly, I suggested that he was being selfish by not considering the monetization of his practice for the benefit of his heirs. He could continue to practice law while still dealing with the economic issues, but that never was considered.

Retirement at the appropriate time is far from the worst scenario for a lawyer. Worse is mortality (and the dire family consequences) before immortalizing the law practice through its monetization.

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Audience type: Small Law Firms, Sole Practitioners