A report three or four years ago by the General Counsel Roundtable found that frustration by in-house attorneys regarding career advancement had not created difficulty for legal departments in attracting, motivating, and retaining attorneys. To the contrary, many legal departments were found to be suffering from the opposite problem – “over-retention and the economic inefficiency resulting from attorneys who accumulate compensation without a corresponding change in the complexity of the work they are asked to perform.” The same point that applies to complexity of work applies to amount of work done – increasingly higher pay may not be matched by increasingly higher productivity.
Members of the Roundtable suggested such varied solutions as workload audits, forced ranking, alumni contractors, managed outplacement, and hybrid positions. I wondered about mandatory retirement policies. If readers know about any policies or laws governing mandatory retirement for members of legal departments, please let me know.