This article is drawn from a recent episode of The Exchange, the podcast hosted by Tom Lenfestey, Founder and CEO of The Law Practice Exchange. In this episode, Tom sits down with longtime collaborator Camille Stell, Vice President of Risk and Practice Management at Lawyers Mutual of North Carolina and one of the most respected law practice management consultants in the country. Their conversation spans 13 years of shared history, hard-won lessons, and an honest look at where succession planning for lawyers stands today—and where it still needs to go. Listen to the full episode here.
A Conversation 13 Years in the Making
When Tom Lenfestey first walked into Lawyers Mutual of North Carolina around 2013 with an idea to help lawyers buy and sell law firms, he wasn’t sure if he’d be welcomed or shown the door. What he found instead was a collaborator.
Camille Stell was already deep in conversations with aging lawyers who had no retirement plan, no succession strategy, and no clear path forward. Tom had a model. One borrowed, in concept, from the dental industry, where graduating students could get bank financing to purchase an existing practice, and a conviction that the same approach could work for law firms. Camille agreed immediately.
“I remember being amazed at how it worked for dentists,” Camille recalls, “and being incredulous that no one had thought about doing it for lawyers yet. And knowing immediately it was going to work.”
That early partnership produced one of the first CLE programs in the country on law firm succession planning. About 50 lawyers showed up to that first session, more than either of them expected. What they heard from those attendees set the tone for the next decade of work.
The Fear That Hasn’t Changed, and the One That Has
Back in 2013, the most common reaction from attorneys was some version of: “This is interesting. But it probably won’t work for me.” My practice is different. I’m a solo. My clients are too personal. There’s nothing to sell here.
Camille is candid that this fear hasn’t entirely disappeared. “While people call and they say, hey, I know about this concept, the underlying fear is still, but will it work for me?” But what has shifted significantly is who’s asking the question and when.
Thirteen years ago, most of Camille’s conversations about succession were with lawyers in their late 70s, far too late to do much strategic planning. Today, those conversations are happening with lawyers in their mid-50s and early 60s. That’s not a small shift. That’s lawyers approaching succession while they still have the runway to do it well, while they still have options, while exit planning can actually be strategic rather than reactive.
“What I know for sure,” Camille describes hearing from lawyers now, “is I’m not going to do this for 15 more years. So help me create a plan that will have me retiring at an earlier age where I’ve got more enjoyment left in life.”
Why Succession Planning Still Feels So Hard
Even with more awareness and earlier conversations, many lawyers still stall. Camille identifies three patterns she sees consistently.
First, there’s the fear that starting the process means it will happen immediately. Lawyers hear “succession planning” and picture themselves cleaning out their desk next month. In reality, a succession plan can be designed for whatever timeline makes sense, two years or ten. The plan doesn’t set the clock; it gives you control over the clock.
Second, there’s the lawyer mindset around competency. Attorneys are trained, ethically and professionally, to be competent before they act. Succession planning sits outside almost everything they learned in law school, and most lawyers haven’t encountered it in their regular CLE circuit. As Tom puts it: “It’s very hard to rely on others when we always think we can become competent ourselves.” But at some point, the smart move is trusting an expert—the same way lawyers trusted digital marketing specialists when that world became too complex to navigate alone.
Third, lawyers want to know the outcome before committing to a path. And succession doesn’t work that way. There isn’t one definitive answer. A succession can look like an internal buyout, an external acquisition, a phased merger, a rural expansion strategy, or a dozen other structures. The uncertainty is real—but as Tom notes, the alternative is worse. “You will exit your practice someday. It will happen. And it will happen with chaos if you don’t plan.”
What Legacy Actually Means to Law Firm Owners
One of the most striking parts of this conversation is Camille’s nuanced take on legacy, a word that gets used a lot in succession discussions, but means something different to almost every lawyer.
For some, legacy is a milestone: reaching 50 years in practice, receiving recognition from the state bar, earning the professional credibility that comes with longevity. For others, it’s community. Camille describes the lawyer whose office sits next to the courthouse—the one people walk into off the street, often without an appointment, sometimes without any money changing hands, just for the peace of mind that comes from talking to someone they trust. “That’s legacy for a lot of lawyers. They look at that community and say, I made a difference here.”
And for others still, legacy is family. Not just biological family, but the support staff who’ve been with a firm for 30 years, the people whose livelihoods are tied to whether the firm transitions successfully.
Understanding which version of legacy matters most to a seller isn’t soft—it’s strategic. It shapes every conversation about timing, structure, and what a successful outcome actually looks like.
Solving the Rural Succession Crisis
One of the conversation’s most forward-looking threads is the challenge facing smaller, non-metro communities where multiple solo practitioners are approaching retirement simultaneously, and there’s no clear next generation of lawyers ready to step in.
Camille points to innovative operators like Brian King in western North Carolina as a model worth studying. King acquires retiring lawyers’ practices and opens offices in small rural communities—not by waiting for talent to appear, but by going upstream. He recruits law students as interns, runs boot camps for summer associates, and invests directly in law school relationships so the right candidates find him early.
But not every community will have a Brian King. For those that don’t, Camille sees technology as an opening: a lawyer who builds a hybrid presence—physically in a community one or two days a week, serving clients remotely beyond that—can make the economics work in ways that a traditional five-days-a-week storefront practice cannot.
The throughline is flexibility. The communities that get served will be the ones that stop requiring succession to look exactly like what came before.
The Transition Plan: Where Deals Actually Succeed or Fail
Both Tom and Camille have been part of enough transactions to know that getting the numbers right is necessary but not sufficient. What separates deals that stick from deals that unravel is the quality of the transition plan.
Camille is specific about what that means in practice. A transition plan has to address management, leadership, client relationships, and external referral relationships. It has to be built on concrete logistics, not good intentions. That means meetings on calendars. Checklists. Buyer and seller sitting down together on a regular cadence—the first Wednesday of every month, lunch every week—and working through referral sources, staff expectations, and operational questions as they come up.
“It doesn’t sound like magic,” Camille says, “but that’s the magic of a transition happening right there.”
The seller’s role in this is irreplaceable. If a seller doesn’t help build staff buy-in for the new owner’s processes and procedures, even the best-designed systems will fail. And beyond the operational mechanics, there’s something emotionally important happening in that transition process: the seller gets to be heard. Their history gets acknowledged. The institutional knowledge gets transferred with care. That matters more to deal outcomes than most buyers initially appreciate.
What’s Actually Changed in 13 Years
The most tangible shift, for both Tom and Camille, is proof. In 2013, they could explain the concept of law firm succession planning. They could describe the dental model, outline the mechanics of a transaction, and make the case theoretically. What they couldn’t do was show lawyers a track record of completed deals: real firms that had transacted successfully, real sellers who came out on the other side with financial security and a life they were excited about.
Today, that proof exists at scale. Hundreds of completed transactions. Market data by practice area. Testimonials from sellers who were skeptical, went through the process, and came out the other side saying—as one of Tom’s clients put it—”I was kind of dumb. Because you know what comes with a loss of control? Less responsibility and more opportunity.”
The lawyers who move toward something—a cruise they’ve been postponing for years, a second career, time with family, a project they’ve always wanted to pursue—have a markedly better experience than those who simply move away from the practice. Retirement toward something, not just away from something, is the emotional frame that makes the whole process work.
Your Next Step
Camille’s advice for any lawyer sitting with this topic: name your top three fears about succession planning. Write them down. Then spend the next few months working through them — one conversation, one piece of information, one step at a time. Most of those fears, when spoken aloud, are far less daunting than they seemed on the inside.
There’s a whole new chapter waiting. The question is whether you plan your way into it — or get surprised by it.
If you’re ready to start the conversation, reach out to The Law Practice Exchange and listen to the full Exchange episode with Camille Stell for more on what succession planning looks like in practice today.
