Age against the machine

During his time as president of the City of London Law Society, a position he held until June this year, Bill Knight regularly made presentations to the senior partners of major City firms. Often the talks related to law firm retirement strategies, and whenever Knight felt the partners weren’t taking full notice of him, he had a guaranteed way of bringing them around.

‘I looked them in the eye and said: “I am the ghost of your future”,’ Knight recalls. ‘That got their attention.’

And so it should. Managing a partner’s retirement properly is a subject close to Knight’s heart. During his five-year tenure as senior partner of Simmons & Simmons, Knight was very much on the other side of the table. When he retired in 2001, at the age of 57, he quickly realised how poorly he had prepared for life after the law. He simply did not have the time while he was still at Simmons, and saw that this was a mistake. It is this message that he has tried to convey to partners ever since. Nevertheless, for most still immersed in the day-to-day reality of working in a major law firm, Knight’s point takes a while to sink in. As a result, many partners ride the career escalator only to find that there is nothing there to catch them at the end.

Reflecting on the days that followed his own retirement, Knight describes a reality that does not fit with the pleasant pipe-and-slippered clichés of going out to pasture. ‘Any big shock to the system, such as retirement, takes about a year to get used to,’ he warns. ‘It’s like a bereavement or a divorce. It’s good to know that going in, and I didn’t. If you know it’s going to take a year, you know it’s not going to last. You’ve been going to work every day for 35 years, so it’s a big shock and one shouldn’t belittle it.’

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