Worcester law firm tackles a wave of successions with strategic planning and an assist from AI

Worcester law firm Mirick is in the midst of an unusual staffing transition: eight longtime employees, nearly all of them non-attorneys, are retiring within a roughly 18-month window, taking with them a combined total of well over a century of institutional knowledge. The departing staff include Kathleen Goulet, the firm's human resources manager, who joined Mirick 40 years ago and will have 47 years of tenure by the time she retires; Randall Gomes, a client financial services manager with the firm since 2007; and Carol Corbett, a senior accounting specialist for 19 years. The retirees include several longtime legal support specialists, who have worked alongside the same attorneys for roughly two decades; and three long-tenured paralegals. “They're pretty instrumental, and they've been here so long,” said Chief Operating Officer Diane Power. “We were always concerned about who's going to succeed them. They have so much institutional knowledge.” Mirick began preparing for this wave of retirements roughly five years ago, said Power and Chief Human Resources Officer Betsy Landry, building on lessons already learned managing attorney succession. “We've been very intentional in the past about planning for the retirement of attorneys and really focused on that transition specifically with respect to our clients,” Landry said. “We realized we had to take that same type of intentional approach with our non-attorneys, because we had so many key members, particularly of the leadership team, that were going to be retiring.” The role of non-attorneys Attorneys tend to draw the spotlight in succession conversations, but paralegals and legal support specialists play a substantial role in client-facing work, Power said. Paralegals conduct legal research, prepare and source documents, sit in on client meetings, and often serve as the primary point of contact for day-to-day requests. “They're the right-hand person,” Power said. “They typically have a lot of client contact.” Nationally, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 376,200 paralegals and legal assistants working in 2024, and projects they will see little net job growth through 2034. Three of Mirick’s eight retiring employees are paralegals with institutional knowledge of specific clients and workloads has built up over roughly two decades each. The retirements arrive amid a broader reshaping of law firm support staffing nationally. Support-staff cost per lawyer at U.S. law firms has been rising even as some traditional support roles have shrunk, according to Thomson Reuters Institute, while more specialized functions such as knowledge management have grown. The length of service among Mirick's retiring employees is far from typical. The median tenure for U.S. wage and salary workers was 3.9 years as of 2024, according to BLS. Even among older workers, whose tenures tend to run longer, the median was 9.6 years for those ages 55 to 64. The firm's overall average employee longevity remains 15.7 years, even after the retirement of one group of long-tenured employees this year. “That's pretty unheard of at most organizations these days,” she said. Capturing knowledge The firm has approached the knowledge-transfer process in phases. “When you're talking about somebody with 47 years of institutional knowledge, you're not going to be able to transfer all of that in a month or two months," Landry said. "It takes time, and one of the things we realized too is most roles have specific responsibilities, but there's also more of those hidden responsibilities that folks just do that may not be included in the job description.” Mirick has begun using AI tools to help turn rough notes from retiring employees into standard operating procedures, Landry said. "It's an incredible time saver," she said. "It's been able to help us ... identify gaps in our documentation and give us an outline, because I think it can be very intimidating to say, ‘Come up with a document of every single thing you do over the course of a week, a month, a year.’” The firm is building in overlap periods, even though that means temporarily paying two people for one job. “It might be a little expensive to have someone overlap further, but the value you'll gain from that knowledge transfer will make up for the investment,” Landry said. Power said that internal buy-in from Mirick's co-managing partners helped make that overlap possible. “It's a credit to the partners realizing, yes, absolutely, there'll be a void for us,” she said. “You can't go out and find that exact person.” Preserving judgement Rather than hire a carbon copy of each retiring employee, Mirick has used the transitions to rethink what several roles should look like going forward, Landry said. "We looked at each one of the roles, we looked at what we anticipated those roles were going to look like in the future, particularly with utilizing AI," she said. Mirick's leadership moved deliberately to control the internal and external narrative around the departures, rather than let rumors fill the gap. "If we weren't controlling the message, people were going to fill the void with their own stories," she said. One of the hardest things to transfer is not procedural knowledge, but judgment, Landry said. “The judgment is impossible to replace,” Landry said. “It takes time to develop that judgment and relationships, and those are the intangibles that are really hard to replace.” Eric Casey is the managing editor at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the real estate and banking & finance industries.