The Great Recession will push plenty of baby boomers to work past traditional retirement age, but others will keep working simply because they don’t want to stop–or can’t.

My friend Barbara Rose has a great feature story in the ABA Journal examining encore careers for boomer attorneys. She notes that more than one-quarter million lawyers are 55 years or older, according to American Bar Foundation statistics. Like the general population, they don’t seem ready to hang it up just yet–just over 60 percent say they want to keep working in some capacity, and 48 percent want to keep practicing law.

Barbara profiles several lawyers who are thinking through their midlife career switches or already are in encore careers:

When John Sherman of Brookline, Mass., took the Myers-Briggs personality test 20 years ago, the test typed him as well-suited for his corporate legal work. “It showed I had a certain edge that was typical of somebody who was a litigator and hard-driving,” he recalls.

Now 63, a father of two grown daughters and retired from a deputy general counsel position at National Grid, a global utility where he worked for 30 years, he took the test again and discovered that he has mellowed. “Some of that edge had worn off.”

He had never been comfortable with personal injury cases, and one case a few years before his retirement affected him deeply. It was a mediation that led to a settlement with the family of an employee who was killed in a workplace accident. He recalls looking across the table at the deceased man’s two young daughters, who were crying, and realizing it didn’t matter that National Grid had a terrific legal defense.

“I thought, ‘I’ve been around doing this stuff for 30 years, and what have I done to make the world a better place, to prevent accidents and stop suffering?” he says.

He had no idea what he would do next when he took a buyout in 2008, but he had already laid the groundwork. Several years earlier, National Grid participated in a project sponsored by the United Nations and 13 multinational corporations to find practical ways to respect and protect human rights in business operations. The project resonated.

“My boss told me, ‘I want you involved in this. We need an adult in the room to make sure we don’t make promises we can’t deliver,’ ” he recalls. “I got involved and became a convert. I found I had unique knowledge. I knew litigation, I was familiar with business ethics and it was all about risk management. I could speak the language of law and business, and learn human rights.”

These days, he bikes the 1½ miles to Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he works pro bono as a senior fellow on the same project, helping to develop tools such as a computer-based application to help companies recognize human rights risks in various parts of their business.

He also mentors Kennedy School students, travels to world capitals to speak at legal forums, participates in peer reviews of human rights cases and collaborates on a project to define the cost of social conflicts. “It’s kind of a rich potpourri,” he says. “I’m never quite sure what I’m going to be doing from week to week.”

Full disclosure: I’m quoted in the story. Read it anyway! Via ABAJournal.com.

Related posts:

1. Blogging the Introduction to Encore Careers seminar
2. IBM launching program for encore non-profit careers
3. Webinar will offer basics on encore careers
4. Encore careers could take off rapidly, survey shows
5. Reader mailbag: Social Security, rollovers and encore careers

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