Specifically, people are having far fewer children and living much longer than at any time in rec0rded history, which means that by the year 2050, 22% of the world’s population (more than three billion people) will be over 60, twice today’s rate. We already knew that in developed countries, the birth rate has fallen to 1.6 children per woman (below the replacement level of 2.1), but some people will be shocked to learn that the birth rate in developing countries — 5.2 children per woman as recently as 1970-75 — has dropped to 2.6.  At the other end of the cycle, worldwide life expectancy will increase 8 years (from 68 to 76) by 2050, reaching an average lifespan of 83 in rich countries. What that comes down to is far fewer workers supporting far more retirees (by 2050, there will be two adults aged 20-64 for every adult 65 or over, half today’s ratio), which figures to result in dramatically lower levels of productivity than we’ve seen for many decades.

As The Economist explains at length, this is an extremely serious issue for every country, with financial consequences that dwarf the expected impact of the fiscal crisis. The legal industry isn’t in the top 100 things that governments will worry about in this regard, but if you have any interest in the profession’s long-term future — which is to say, if you expect to be in practice 20 or more years from now, or if your firm plans to be a going concern in 2050 — you should be thinking today about the potentially devastating combination of demographics and the simple passage of time.  Here are a few places to start.

1. Get ready for the end of retirement, warns The Economist: “few governments, employers or individuals have yet come to terms with where retirement is heading: the end of the whole concept. Whether we like it or not, we are going back to the pre-Bismarckian world, where work had no formal stopping point.” Unless you’ve made a boatload of money by 65 and managed it very well, you should assume you won’t be retiring then or anytime close to it. Picture older partners staying on with a firm indefinitely, starting with those whose investments were decimated in the market crash and can’t afford to retire. Active lawyers in their 70s and 80s will become commonplace, perhaps as Net-connected solos working with select clients from home on a full- or part-time basis.

2. Four generations in one firm will not be unusual. Keep in mind that the Millennial Generation has run its course; since the turn of the century, every new baby has been part of the next cohort — call it Generation Z for the moment. The first Z’ers will enter law school around 2025 and the practice of law by 2030. During the 2030s, law firms will include young Z’ers, Millennial partners, scattered 60-something Gen-X holdovers, and a surprising number of aged Boomers still cranking out work into their 70s and 80s. Generation Z won’t be a huge presence: Millennials will be by far the most numerous and powerful generation in law firms, since the slimmed-down firms of the future won’t require the vast grazing fields of associates familiar from the 20th century.

3. The massive partner incomes of today could well be considered relics of a bygone era, reminiscent of how we now think of railway barons’ fortunes. Partly, this will be because the revolution in the legal services marketplace will take billions of dollars away from law firms, as outsourced practitioners and sophisticated technology snap up formerly lucrative lower-end lawyer work.  But it’s also because there will simply be far fewer working-age adults –  industries of all kinds are going to be smaller and less lucrative than before. There won’t just be  fewer lawyers to do the work; there’ll be fewer clients to provide it.  Barring major breakthroughs in the latent legal marketplace — lawyers learning to sell preventive legal services and good legal health services to clients that competitors can’t — the volume of legal work ought to be lower, just like everything else.

4.  Unfunded pension liabilities could crush some firms well before 2050. Those employees (staff as well as lawyers) who do eventually retire are going to live longer, and their numbers will multiply as the Boomers finally slide out of working life. This will constitute a major ongoing cost center for firms, and if those liabilities aren’t funded, bankruptcy is a real possibility, as a recent ABA Journal article pointed out. The fear of massive pension obligations will motivate firms to cajole their elderly employees into staying on in some paid capacity, if for no other reason than to delay having to provide them retirement benefits. If your own firm hasn’t addressed this yet, it could be in serious trouble.

5. Say goodbye to a lot of law schools. If the coming wave of legal education reform hasn’t already knocked many law schools out of the game, they can expect to be finished off by a simultaneous drop in both the supply of law students and the demand for new law graduates. The profession will have enough trouble finding work for the older lawyers who won’t or can’t retire; there just won’t be a compelling business case for many new hires. And remuneration for new lawyers figures to drop — keep those clippings about $160,000 starting salaries for posterity — making law school a less attractive option. It’s not a stretch to anticipate that half the law schools in your country will be gone by 2050 — a legal education system that grew fat from the Boomer years onwards simply won’t be able to survive a period of scarcity like this.

These won’t be entirely dire outcomes — there are good news stories here. Many lawyers in their 60s have long felt obliged to quit the profession even though they still had contributions to make and wisdom to pass on; the bias against older workers is as prevalent in the law as anywhere else. And the legal profession today suffers from serious bloat; a little demographic-powered surgery would not be a bad thing. But the force and breadth of the upheaval will still come as a shock to us, because it’ll be incredibly different from what we’ve long assumed is normal but is in fact a product of a particular demographic period that’s now ending. As The Economist points out, the US set its retirement age at 65 at a time when the average American died at 62. Lengthy retirement is a very recent phenomenon, and its time is already ending.

So start wrapping your mind around having to work well into your 70s or even later, with associates 50 or even 60 years your junior, for much less money than today’s lawyers take for granted. Unless you’re 50 or older, this likely describes the legal profession you’ll encounter when you reach the soon-to-just-another-age of 65 — and even 50-something lawyers should proceed carefully. Of all the trends now acting to change the practice of law, this one might be the most significant — and it’s certainly the only one that’s flat-out guaranteed to happen.

It’s your problem, Gen-X and Gen-Y. Not ours. Work, figure it out, ask questions, and we’ll help you–but it’s your job to adjust to “us” and the often hard adventure of learning to solve problems for your employer and its clients.

This is a great distillation of the frustration and resentment many Boomers feel about all the fuss being made about Millennials, whom many Boomers widely perceive as complacent and arrogant beyond their years. As a Gen-Xer, I don’t share that sentiment myself, and I don’t really care one way or another which generation is friendly with whom. But I do think there are a couple of useful points to be made here.

The first is about market inefficiencies. Like them or not, Millennials are entering the legal workplace, and they represent the thin edge of the talent wedge for which employers will be competing very hard in years to come. If you have problems with Millennials — with what you perceive as their attitude, ambition, enormous self-regard and “sense of entitlement” — that’s your right. But it puts you at risk of a competitive disadvantage with your rivals who are unburdened by these difficulties. Disliking Millennials is a market inefficiency, and employers who can approach Gen Y with a clean slate will accordingly be ahead of the game. That might not matter much right now, with Millennials still in the first few and least useful years of practice. But soon enough, it will matter a lot.

The second is the fact that Dan is right, on a couple of points: the amount of attention paid to Gen-Yers is disproportionate to their current presence in the legal profession, and Boomers still hold the reins of power in almost every legal institution (law firm, legal department, government office) you care to name. Understanding Millennials enough to get the most out of them is becoming an important advantage in the talent wars, but at least right now, it’s not as important as figuring out the ambivalent Gen-Xers overrepresented in the non-equity partners ranks or, especially, the aging Boomers hanging onto their files and practices with tight fists.

So the balance of this post is for Generation Y lawyers, and aims to answer the question: how can you adjust to Boomers and, to a lesser extent, Gen-Xers in the legal workplace? Here are four quick points to keep in mind.

1. Boomers believe in the corporate ladder. They created and crawled up through the law firm partnership hierarchy, by which associates endure six to nine years of purgatory before being ushered through the pearly gates of partnership. You might think this system is irrational, arbitrary and self-serving, but don’t mistake it for a mere structural aberration: it’s central to the Boomer concept of “paying your dues,” and if you expressly reject it, your employers will take it personally. Try to understand that “time served” is a meaningful measure of qualification and character for many Boomer lawyers. If you disagree, do it quietly.

2. Boomers can’t stand “entitlement mentalities.” Yes, it’s ironic, considering Boomers basically invented the concept during their 60-year march through demographic history. But, related to the concept of “paying your dues,” Boomer lawyers feel they worked for everything they ever got, and you should have to go through it too. (Women Gen-Yers: you’ll find this attitude coming between you and some potential female mentors.) This gives them a deep aversion to “work-life balance,” which they hear as “I want all the perks of success without any of the hard work.” I know that’s not how most of you feel, but that’s the reputation that’s preceding you into the workforce. Drop terms like “balance” and “holistic” in favour of “focus” and “integration,” and talk a lot about “commitment” and “professionalism” — two very elastic words that Boomers love to hear.

3. Boomers don’t understand multitasking. Well, they do, but in the sense of “I’m carrying 75 files at one time,” rather than “I’m drafting a top-notch memo while IM’ing a friend and listening to a podcast.” Boomers live in a linear and sequential world, while you were thinking outside the box before it became a cliché. Great illustration: a consultant told me of a Gen-Y associate, loaded down with work, who received yet another task from a partner. Another associate volunteered to do the task for her. The associate accepted gratefully; the partner hit the roof. That represents two completely rational, and completely incompatible, ways of dealing with workflow issues. What it comes down to is this: don’t give a Boomer lawyer any reason to think he or his current task has anything less than your full attention and priority.

4. Gen-Xers don’t believe in the system. Ironically enough, this is one point on which Boomers and Millennials stand on common ground: they’re both idealists, believing in the idea of grand accomplishments for the greater societal good. For many Boomers, it was civil rights; for many Gen-Yers, it’s the environment: for both, it’s a no-brainer that there are causes worth fighting for. Gen-Xers don’t buy it. They aim low, keep expectations in check, emphasize self-sufficiency, and distrust organizations, institutions and big ideas. Don’t approach a Gen-X partner with a great plan for a major client initiative or departmental overhaul; go to the Boomer instead, because you’ll find a much more kindred spirit. But do consult a Gen-Xer if you need a workaround, a pragmatic alternative — or just a dose of cynical commiseration about those frickin’ Boomers.

Well, first of all, there’s a qualitative difference between simply allowing laptops into class and enabling those laptops’ Internet capacities through wireless access. Banning laptops today would be tantamount to banning pen and paper in a 1990 classroom — law students now take notes directly onto their computers, and I don’t see the point in making them take notes manually in class and then type them out later at home (though I’ve heard, and can testify, that writing in longhand seems to engage different and more creative parts of the brain than typing).

So a laptop should be viewed as an essential learning tool nowadays. But activate that laptop’s wireless capacity, and suddenly the entire Net is inside the classroom on dozens of different screens, and that’s a whole different story.

It’s true that millennials are great multi-taskers and can surf the web for a few minutes while still staying engaged in the flow of the lecture. But if you’re sitting in class and there are 50 different screens between you and the professor, featuring a continuous flow of video, e-mails, Facebook pages and the like, there’s no way you won’t be distracted. Your eyes will be drawn whether you like it or not, and your attention will be divided any number of ways. The individual surfer can control what she sees, but the people behind her can’t. That’s not fair, and it damages the larger learning environment.

That said, I don’t see any way in which a wireless ban is sensible or feasible. In most cases, wireless access isn’t something you can just turn on and off at the classroom door — other parts of the school need it (especially the library), and in any event, there are private- and pubic-sector wifi sources outside of those provided by the university. You could order students to disable their laptops’ wireless access, but who’s going to police that? The professor is busy lecturing, few students will be anxious to squeal on their classmates, and anyway, is this really something we want to introduce to the law classroom? Muni-wifi’s struggles notwithstanding, we’re heading rapidly towards a “wireless everywhere” future, so we need a better solution than prohibition.

But maybe the problem isn’t students accessing the Internet during law school lectures. Maybe the problem is that the law school lecture itself is an instutition whose pedagogical day has passed.

Read the comments from law students opposing the wireless ban — their most frequent argument is that the lectures themselves are dull, pedestrian, long-winded, and not particularly useful in helping learn the subject. Even if these charges are unfair at least some of the time, they’re not new. Sitting through lectures in the early 90s, long before laptops, I remember being bored out of my gourd on quite a few occasions — passing notes to classmates, checking the clock, trying to stay focused on the professor’s drone in order to pick up important or useful bits as he went along. Profs failing to engage students is nothing new — and today, with more schools hiring faculty for their research and publishing credentials rather than their teaching skills, I expect it might be worse.

But I don’t really blame the profs either, because it’s a tall order to keep scores of smart young law students focused and engaged for a full hour (sometimes two or three hours at a time) in the traditional lecture hall format: semi-circles of students rising concentrically from the foot of an underground classroom, lengthy monologues interrupted by occasional questions to and from students, detailed notes taken laboriously in a hedge against the possibility that this item might appear on the 100% final exam two months away. This is not how adults learn.

Nor is it how lawyers learn or conduct business. I can’t think of any occasions (outside of equally primitive CLE presentations) where lawyers accomplish anything useful sitting in an auditorium and having someone talk at them relentlessly. But I can think of numerous occasions where lawyers gather around a conference room table with a small group of fellow professionals and pitch in to understand a problem or hash out a solution. If that sounds like a law school seminar to you, then we might agree that the small-group seminar is a far more promising method to pursue if we really want law students to learn and engage.

I don’t hear of too many seminars where wireless laptop access is a problem. When you’re one of at most two dozen people gathered around a common surface, facing each other and expected to contribute to a common goal, you’re not going to be checking your e-mail — you don’t have the cover and comfort of facelessness and anonymity that a lecture-hall setting provides, and you’re too busy keeping up with the conversation to wander onto the Net. It’s one thing to go surfing in the eighth row when the prof rarely glances your way; it’s another when you have to directly demonstrate to your friends and classmates how little you care about what they have to say.

What we’re seeing here is a harbinger that the days of “bulk learning” in law school are drawing to a close. It’s long been convenient for schools to gather scores of students into one big hall and “teach” them en masse — it requires fewer professors and fewer facilities, and therefore less money and less hassle. If that has ever really been a good way to instruct future lawyers, it isn’t anymore, and the wireless laptop debate is bringing that into sharp relief.

If law schools really want to stop students from surfing the web during class, here are some steps they could take.

1. Drop the bulk lecture. Stop teaching students in any group larger than about 20 or 25. The bigger the class, the less focused the teaching and the less engaged the students will be. Take away the protective cover of relative anonymity, and students will stop hiding in the long grass.

2. Increase small-group instruction. My first-year Torts class was taught in a group of 25, and was markedly more engaged and engaging than the lecture-theater courses — the prof couldn’t fall back on monologue lectures, and students didn’t want to run the academic and social risks of detachment. Small-group teaching also allows “class participation” to be graded meaningfully. Better still, further sub-divide students into work-group teams, MBA-style, to achieve tasks — another skill they’ll need in the practice of law.

3. Put the onus on students to lead discussions. Law professors should be facilitators, not lecturers — their job should be to guide students as they take charge of their own learning process. I guarantee that law students — bright, ambitious, extremely motivated and competitive — will be tougher on themselves and each other than the hardest of veteran lecturers. Students responsible for leading the discussion won’t be checking their e-mails.

4. Hire and reward professors for classroom skills. I understand the pressures faced by law schools that make them undervalue the ability to teach. But that’s no excuse for failing to meet their promise to deliver a truly powerful learning environment to the students who pay their bills. If you must keep the large-lecture format, hire professors who can maximize the learning impact of this stunted opportunity.

Wireless laptop access in class is nothing more than a symptom of a disengaged student population and a lecture-hall method that has outlived its usefulness. The less we talk about wireless, and the more we talk about in-class engagement, the closer we’ll be to a solution.

Law firm leaders who complain about the values of their Gen-Y lawyers need to remember that there are a lot of Gen-Y clients out there, too. On the corporate side, Millennials are playing key roles in many forward-looking industries like life sciences, biotechnology, new media, offshoring, financial innovations, and more. On the individual side, Millennials are buying houses, drawing up wills, getting married (and divorced) and starting up small businesses. Thanks to their affluent Boomer parents, they’re not short on funds, and there’s more of them out there every year. But if a law firm can’t even relate to its own Millennial lawyers, how can it realistically expect to gain the confidence of Millennial clients?

This isn’t just about Generation Y, though — this crosses all generations and touches on fundamental issues of marketing and client care. Part of really understanding your clients (something every successful firm has to do) is understanding the demographic leanings and preferences with which every client comes equipped — and having understood them, incorporating them into your strategies both for dealing with these clients and for seeking out new ones.

It’s more than just not sending the earnest Boomer to talk up the jaded Gen-X entrepreneur, or leaving the presumptuous Millennial alone with the distant Silent retiree. It’s about crafting a complete range of tactical approaches to clients — talent selection, methods of communication, service delivery vehicles, etc. — designed to increase a particular client’s engagement, comfort level, and resonance with the firm. Obviously, you can’t tell everything about clients from their year of birth, but generational influences are real, and they need to be factored into all manner of communication, from initial marketing efforts to ongoing service delivery.

Susan Cartier Liebel discusses these important points in a post at Build a Solo Practice LLC about generational relations in the law, which in turn refers to a Copyblogger post by James Chartrand that provides a quick-and-dirty summary of generational attributes. The upshot of James’ article is that marketing and publicity materials need to be targeted to customers in part depending on their generational influences. One of the points of Susan’s article is that this is especially true in lawyers’ relations with clients. Both posts make excellent points that lawyers should read and take to heart when framing how they deal with clients and designing the tailored vehicles by which they communicate to them.

The fact is, succession planning in law firms is a monstrous challenge. And if you’re just now getting around to thinking about it, then there’s a pretty good chance you’re already too late. Shifting the bulk of client responsibilities from more senior to more junior lawyers isn’t something you roll out on short notice. If your firm culture doesn’t already endorse in some way multi-generational client responsibility, genuine mentoring efforts, and innovative compensation methods, be realistic that the odds are against a happy ending.

Why is succession planning so hard? Pick your poison:

1. Loss of power. Succession planning hits every lawyer, especially older ones, at an almost feral level. Change in law firms is always hard, but when you’re talking about fang-and-claw issues like money, power and control, lines will be drawn and obstinacy will rule the day. Those with power will cling to it all the more tightly when they feel it’s threatened.

2. Resistance to change. Lawyers don’t like change at the best of times, so don’t expect them to suddenly start liking changes to who gets to lead trials, drive deals and get client face time. As independent professionals, they will fiercely resist management’s attempts to dictate how “their” clients are handled.

3. Few future leaders. Senior lawyers will say that the juniors “aren’t ready” to take on more responsibility — and often, they’re right, because the seniors have systematically excluded the juniors from meaningful client contact and lead roles on key matters. You can thank firms’ compensation systems in part for that, rewarding lawyers for direct proximity to clients and encouraging hoarding.

4. Generational conflicts. I still can’t get over the resentment that Boomers and even some Xers feel towards the Millennials now moving up the ranks. Gen-Yers are not a passing fad — there are 25 years of Millennials lined up to enter firms, and they’re going to change a lot more than the furniture in the reception area. Too many firms waste too much energy in pointless conflicts between older and younger lawyers, and it can make real succession planning a very unpleasant chore.

So what can you do if your firm is in this situation — late to the succession-planning party and facing multiple challenges to success? Opinions differ, but mine is that you should focus your efforts on saving who and what you can. It’s unlikely that a firm-wide epiphany of carin’ ‘n’ sharin’ is going to sweep your firm and transform partners over the next year or two, and you’d probably exhaust yourself in the effort. Law firm culture is just too big and powerful to change all at once, and you can’t force change on lawyers.

So, identify pockets of potential success. Find individual lawyers who have successfully begun transitioning their juniors, or who have shown a willingness to try. See if there are particularly well-functioning practice groups that could constitute fertile ground for transitions. Figure out who your best mentors are. These should be considered and treated as the new stars of your firm — they’re the seeds you’re planting for a profitable crop in 2015 and beyond.

Make sure you also make the effort to hold up these people and groups as examples for others to follow. Chances are, most won’t follow. That’s not a great outcome, but that’s life. More law firms and practice groups will die off because of senior lawyers’ inability or unwillingness to properly transition their legacies to younger protégés than from any other cause. You owe it to those lawyers to strongly signal that this is what the firm wants from them. But if and when their resistance becomes clear, your obligation shifts to the firm’s long-term health, to developing a transition-friendly culture and attracting lawyers who fit there.

Of course, there’s one thing you’ll need to do in order to have any real chance of getting through your firm’s succession crisis: you need to create incentives to transition, most of them monetary. The sad fact is that law firms have trained lawyers to respond only to self-interested incentives, so don’t expect to get anywhere by appealing to their good nature or the long-term interests of the firm. Reward lawyers who facilitate successful transitions: big bonuses, supercharged billable hours, or fewer hourly requirements, along with new titles, higher prestige, a bigger office — whatever it takes to loosen their death grip on the power they’ve earned and to which they’ve become extremely accustomed.

The best solution, obviously, is a firm culture that innately rewards lawyers who share client contact, knowledge, experience, trial time, deal presence and more, especially with younger professionals. But firms like this are few and far between. If your firm’s culture isn’t like that, hesitate before trying to transform it into one overnight, and think instead about concentrating on your most promising sectors. Not everyone is going to make it through the crisis. Figure out who can, and start building there.

I read that and thought of the survey of law firm associates that Hildebrandt issued a little while ago. Its findings caused something of a stir by flouting the conventional wisdom that associates, especially in large firms, were overworked, stressed and deeply unhappy. I won’t go into the nuts and bolts here, but among the findings was that satisfaction was much higher than expected and that there was no correlation between long hours and unhappiness — rather the opposite, in fact. I think these two items say something about today’s new lawyers that law firms need to understand.

I continue to be amazed by senior lawyers who complain long and loud about the current generation entering their firms: “no commitment,” “not willing to pay their dues,” “a sense of entitlement,” and occasionally, even “lazy” are among the apparent sins of the young. The people saying these things are very smart, very capable, often leaders of their firms, but I don’t think they’re grasping a critical point: by and large, today’s new lawyers have no qualms whatsoever about working long and hard. What they have serious qualms about is working long and hard on rote tasks, unfulfilling assignments, due diligence and similar kinds of docket-filler, with few opportunities for serious client contact, independent undertakings, or crunch-time appearances in dealrooms and courtrooms.

The standard large law firm model, both economic and cultural, requires junior lawyers to labour in the salt mines for a certain period of time; those able and willing to make it through advance to the next phase. That’s the way it’s been for decades now. But it looks to me as if the newest shipment of law school grads isn’t interested in playing that game. They’ve been raised from Day One by their Boomer parents to work hard, seeking out and conquering challenges, and they expect work to be engaging and meaningful. It’s no surprise that they chafe and carp about what lands on their desks at law firms, and it’s equally unsurprising that their employers aren’t sympathetic.

But what Seth observes and what Hildebrandt shows is that there’s potential here for a more positive result. Young lawyers, if set to work on tasks that stretch their abilities and engage their intellect, will respond enthusiastically and become tremendous resources for their law firms, now and down the road. They won’t talk as much about “work/life balance” because they’ll be more willing to make work their life — if the work matters and if it allows them to rapidly develop their skills.

I’m pretty firmly of the mind that the disconnect today is not between hard-working older lawyers and laid-back young ones — it’s between different ideas of what should constitute satisfying work for novice lawyers. The firms that can (a) figure this out and (b) re-engineer their processes to get their new lawyers engaged quickly on meaningful work that develops skills and contacts will have a great advantage in winning the generational war. Law firms are run by smart people, so I think they’ll get the first one soon enough. But the second? Well, it takes quite a while to get a fully loaded tanker ship sailing at full speed to change direction.

During the past 50-odd years, the North American legal profession has been notable for a ready supply of labour. The post-war population boom and increased access to post-secondary education, combined with the enduring lure of a legal career, ensured that there would always be a deep pool of lawyers into which firms could dip for talent.

When a buyer’s market lasts that long, the buyers’ advantages become locked into the prevailing culture of the marketplace. Much of what we take for granted in modern law firms — hourly billable targets, ever-increasing workloads, lengthening partnership tracks, client hoarding by partners, and more — can be traced at least in part to firms’ established ability to dictate the terms of employment to a fairly low-cost and easily leveraged labour pool. Law firm employers have held the whip hand for so long that we’ve come to think it’s just the natural order of things.

That’s about to change. Talent — in nicer terms, the actual human beings who provide legal services — is becoming scarce. This is new, and for a lot of law firms, it’s not going to be fun.

Obviously, part of it is that demographics giveth and demographics taketh away. The great Boomer exodus from the workforce isn’t unfolding as dramatically as some predicted, but the legal recruiters I’ve talked with say it’s a real issue.

It’s not so much that the Boomer partners have reached “retirement age” — I think this generation will stay fully occupied at one thing or another till the day they drop — but that many of them won’t be enticed to keep plugging away at the firm. They’re financially comfortable, their kids have grown, and they want to travel, or start a vineyard, or become full-time directors, or give back to their communities, or do something other than show up at the office again this week. One way or another, their numbers will start dropping faster than age-related attrition would suggest.

At the other end, the Millennials are now entering the profession. Enough has been published about the workplace impact of Generation Y to choke a horse, but the key takeaway here is that members of this cohort believe they have many more options than the two generations that came before it. They’ve never experienced a recession, they’ve always been able to count on financial backup from their parents, and they’ve never been given a reason to live by any terms but their own.

In short, they’re natural-born sellers — and by a happy coincidence, they’re entering the first seller’s market the legal profession has seen in decades. This is already discombobulating a lot of partnership committees that aren’t used to hearing current or prospective employees talk and behave like this.

But it’s not just that this group has a different attitude towards work. It’s also a different marketplace for talent out there.

The new economy is providing scores of new career paths for people with legal backgrounds. Many of these paths offer more interesting work in more exciting industries for more money than the law can provide (notice how “fewer hours,” the supposed Achilles’ heel of these supposedly uncommitted youngsters, isn’t on that list?). One of the reasons New York law firms had to raise first-year lawyer salaries to $160,000 a year was that investment banks and hedge funds, cutting-edge employers for whom money truly is no object, were snapping up the top law grads. This won’t be confined to the Big Apple. Law firms all over the continent are going to find it increasingly hard to compete with other employers who can offer lawyers interesting work at a good salary.

Many firms faced with this problem are going to try solving it the old-fashioned way: throwing money at it. That doesn’t work terribly well at the moment, and it’s going to work less well in future, because the truly fatal characteristic of many law firm jobs isn’t the money or even the hours or the pressure — it’s that the quality of the work isn’t all that great.

What a lot of law firm associates are quietly saying is that the type of work they typically receive is distinguished largely by drudgery and routine. Younger lawyers aren’t afraid of working hard, but they have a heartfelt aversion to working hard at mundane tasks for years on end without an excellent reason for doing so. These lawyers want to do interesting work, learn new skills, and improve their networks in a congenial atmosphere. And they’ll go to the wall for employers who offer it.

But many law firm partners still keep most of the good work and client contact to themselves. And no one has ever accused your average law firm of being an upbeat, can-do workplace. When there were lots of lawyers around who didn’t feel they had many other career choices — and who were a lot more interested in gaining equity partnership status than this current group is — firms could get away with that kind of stuff. Now, not so much. The resounding message many younger lawyers have been sending firms the last few years is that life in a law firm is not, as they say, all that and a bag of chips.

So, what do we have? The departure of older Boomers is set to accelerate, and the influx of newer Millennials is going to be diluted. In the result, there will be fewer lawyers available to take on the available work, which should mean these lawyers can demand higher wages and other concessions from their firms. This will come at a particularly bad time for law firms, which are getting very strong signals from corporate clients that they’re tired of underwriting the latest record profit-per-partner numbers. But the potential impact is greater than that.

I started by suggesting that today’s dominant law firm culture has been shaped by the marketplace realities of the last half-century, which in turn was heavily influenced by demographics. As the Millennials become more and more of a political force within firms, I think you’re going to see a cultural shift too.

Boomers, for whom time was a means to an end, will be replaced by Gen-Yers, for whom time is an end in itself — so how much longer do you think the billable hour system will continue? Boomers think in linear terms and are focused on individual goals, while Millennials collaborate almost by instinct and are natural multitaskers — how long do you think client hoarding will rule and cross-selling will be ignored? Many Boomers still resent e-mail, while Generation Y lives and breathes through online communication — how much longer before extranets, blogs and wikis are part of the everyday fabric of a firm’s operations?

I’m not saying that the march of the Millennials marks the dawn of a golden age — this new generation has plenty of blemishes too, not least an inability to cope with the kind of severe economic downturns that we can expect in short and rapid order. Not all change is good. But it’s reasonable to think that we finally will see law firms break out of their old routines and regimes and start resembling the rest of the 21st-century business world. And there’s actually some irony in that.

Over the years, those of us advocating major operational and cultural evolution in the practice of law have come to despair of effecting change from within. So instead, we’ve been waiting and hoping that clients would throw their weight around and apply sufficient pressure to promote new practices. That’s starting to happen in a few places, but most clients haven’t yet woken up to their own power. It would be fairly ironic, then, if change did end up emanating from inside the profession after all, through the simple manifestation of generational turnover.

But I think we’re in the last days of the law school reunion. There are 342 Facebook groups with “law school” in the title, including one for Osgoode Hall’s 2007 graduating class that has (at time of writing) 129 members. In the age of social networks and real-time status updates on your fellow graduates’ lives, who needs the once-a-decade catch-up cocktail party in the old law lounge?

I raise this is to illustrate a fundamental change coming down the pike in how the legal profession conducts and organizes itself, and those changes are because of you.

You’re entering a profession whose culture was determined (consciously and otherwise) by the Baby Boomers. Gen-Xers like me never had the critical mass to alter that culture, so we just grumbled about it. But the generation graduating from law school these days can change things — and it will.

It’s not just about this whole “work-life balance” thing, which is overblown anyway (law is hard work, no matter who your employer is). It’s about foundational differences in how Boomers and Millennials view themselves and society. Here are some examples, all framed in generalized terms:

• Boomers viewed time as a means to an end (usually, higher earnings) and so created the billable hour system to calculate the value of legal services. Millennials view time as an end in itself — what system will you create to sell your work?

• Boomers maintained the great divide between lawyer and client — “we’re” the experts in charge, “they’re” the recipients of our wisdom. Millennials tend unconsciously towards collaboration, working with (not above) others — how will you relate to clients?

• Boomers were disturbed by the overwhelmingly white-male face of the profession and tried to make diversity a priority. Millennials take diversity for granted, and might not pay as much attention to the entry barriers still in place. How will you ensure diversity?

I could go on. With the legal profession finally undergoing true generational turnover (see our cover story), all the old assumptions are in play — everything’s up for grabs. You’re the ones who will set the rules, the expectations, the culture for lawyers for the next half-century. Go.

This post first appeared as the editorial in the 2007 Law Student issue of National magazine.

But I think we’re in the last days of the law school reunion. There are 342 Facebook groups with “law school” in the title, including one for Osgoode Hall’s 2007 graduating class that has (at time of writing) 129 members. In the age of social networks and real-time status updates on your fellow graduates’ lives, who needs the once-a-decade catch-up cocktail party in the old law lounge?

I raise this is to illustrate a fundamental change coming down the pike in how the legal profession conducts and organizes itself, and those changes are because of you.

You’re entering a profession whose culture was determined (consciously and otherwise) by the Baby Boomers. Gen-Xers like me never had the critical mass to alter that culture, so we just grumbled about it. But the generation graduating from law school these days can change things — and it will.

It’s not just about this whole “work-life balance” thing, which is overblown anyway (law is hard work, no matter who your employer is). It’s about foundational differences in how Boomers and Millennials view themselves and society. Here are some examples, all framed in generalized terms:

• Boomers viewed time as a means to an end (usually, higher earnings) and so created the billable hour system to calculate the value of legal services. Millennials view time as an end in itself — what system will you create to sell your work?

• Boomers maintained the great divide between lawyer and client — “we’re” the experts in charge, “they’re” the recipients of our wisdom. Millennials tend unconsciously towards collaboration, working with (not above) others — how will you relate to clients?

• Boomers were disturbed by the overwhelmingly white-male face of the profession and tried to make diversity a priority. Millennials take diversity for granted, and might not pay as much attention to the entry barriers still in place. How will you ensure diversity?

I could go on. With the legal profession finally undergoing true generational turnover (see our cover story), all the old assumptions are in play — everything’s up for grabs. You’re the ones who will set the rules, the expectations, the culture for lawyers for the next half-century. Go.

This post first appeared as the editorial in the 2007 Law Student issue of National magazine.

The law societies of British Columbia and Ontario have produced reports on this subject, and both identify it as a serious matter for the profession. I’m not entirely sure that it is, for a couple of reasons.

First, that belief presumes that a shortage or absence of lawyers in small centers results in reduced access to justice in those locations. Lawyers have long believed that only they can really provide legal services competently, even as the alternative legal services market (primarily paralegals, but also including title insurers and do-it-yourself will CDs) continues to flourish every year. It would hardly behoove the LSUC, for instance, to maintain that lawyers are a sine qua non for access to justice when the LSUC itself has battled successfully to gain the right to regulate paralegals.

Before we decide that only lawyers’ services pass the threshold of providing access to justice, maybe we ought to let someone else try. If lawyers really want to ensure the best possible world for access to justice, they should help throw open the legal-services marketplace to as many competitors as the market will allow, and let clients sort the wheat from the chaff. Perhaps needless to say, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Secondly, it’s not clear to me that law societies ought to be responsible for ensuring what amounts to a lawyer in every community, like a chicken in every pot. Law societies are statutorily charged with governing the profession in the public interest – hatching, matching and dispatching lawyers, to paraphrase the TV show.

The law societies are not, I don’t think, mandated to ensure access to justice; certainly, they have neither the funding nor the authority with which to accomplish that. If the marketplace is pulling lawyers away from smaller centers and towards the cities – which is also happening in the general population, as yesterday’s census results confirm – then I don’t see why lawyers’ governing bodies should attempt to maintain what amounts to an artificial geographical distribution of lawyers that belongs to a different demographic generation.

I’m doubtful in any event that the debt-relief option for lawyers relocating to smaller centers is the answer. Skyrocketing tuition fees are a relatively recent phenomenon, but small-center Canada has been failing to recruit new lawyers for much longer, as the average age of its current lawyers (55) attests. Debt relief also assumes that new lawyers will choose Red Deer over Calgary or Smiths Falls over Toronto primarily if their student loans will be paid off more quickly, and I’m not sure there’s evidence to support that. I don’t think these sorts of incentives have worked very well with doctors, for instance.

What this whole thing really presages is a discussion of who is a lawyer, and why. For all the organized bar’s contempt for paralegals, your average solo in Wawa, Glace Bay or Trail has a lot more in common with the local paralegal than he or she does with a pharmaceutical patent lawyer in Ottawa, a tax litigator in Vancouver, or an oil-and-gas dealmaker in Halifax. The general term “lawyer” now encompasses such a wide diversity of professionals that it doesn’t really make sense to categorize them under one term.

In future, I think we’ll see the legal services marketplace continue to break down along price points and risk factors. Already, the type of legal work most commonly found in small towns simply doesn’t pay enough to justify law society fees, professional insurance and practice overhead (or at least, to supply the type of income most lawyers still consider commensurate with their professional standing). Real estate alone is pretty much done as a lawyers’ staple; only title insurers and banks have the volume and risk coverage to properly manage it anymore.

So long as it costs a lot of money to obtain and maintain a lawyers’ licence, the type of legal work that can justify the cost of a lawyer will continue to shrink – in no small part because technological advances will continue to reduce the cost of many services lawyers have traditionally been able to offer exclusively. The urban-rural breakdown of lawyer distribution is as much symptomatic of this change in the legal marketplace as it is of any other associated demographic trend.

This post originally appeared as a comment to a post at Slaw on March 14, 2007.