posted on Saturday, October 06, 2007 8:13 AM
by
Lou Michels
Sidley settles
Over a year ago I wrote about the Sidley Austin age discrimination class-action going on here in Chicago. Sidley settled the suit yesterday, agreeing to pay the terminated partners more than $27 million, and also agreeing that it would not enforce a mandatory retirement age for its partners. In other words, Sidley effectively admits that the partners who are not part of its executive management group are employees, with full protection of the federal and presumably state antidiscrimination laws.
This represents a fundamental change in the management of large, traditionally organized law firms, and presumably other similar professional services entities. The large national firms, with hundreds of partners sharing in the profits or losses of the operation, will have to take greater care to ensure full participation in firm decisions, or risk finding themselves in the same position as Sidley. Otherwise partner management is going to start looking a lot more like employee management. That means less job security for partners, and probably less room at the top as partners will likely elect to work past the traditional mandatory retirement age of 65.