It’s rare to go to an advisory industry event without hearing dire pronouncements about the greying of the industry and the need to recruit and groom younger advisors.

Unfortunately, the strategic solution to the industry’s age dilemma—hiring and training younger staff—can also have unintended consequences when it comes to running afoul of the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which turned 50 this year.

“After 50 years of a federal law whose purpose is to promote the employment of older workers based on ability, age discrimination remains too common and too accepted,” EEOC Acting Chair Victoria Lipnic said.

Six out of 10 older workers have seen or experienced age discrimination in the workplace and 90 percent of those say it is common, according to the the EEOC’s new report: The State of Age Discrimination and Older Workers in the U.S.

“Despite decades of research finding that age does not predict ability or performance, employers often fall back on precisely the ageist stereotypes the ADEA was enacted to prohibit,” Lipnic said.

Breaching age discrimination laws is a costly misstep for any company. Just ask Amazon, Facebook, Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC), TMobile and a growing number of companies currently embroiled in age discrimination lawsuits brought by workers who allege that the companies aggressively discriminate against older employees by targetting ads to exclusively recruit younger workers.

“We knew this was going on all along behind the scenes and these lawsuits just bring it to light,” said Laurie McCann, a senior attorney for the AARP Foundation who believes favorable outcomes in these lawsuits could help improve job opportunities for older Americans by setting explicit standards for advertising and employment practices.

“ADEA was enacted 50 years ago and back then ads said, ‘No one over 50 years old need apply.’ Today, that kind of blatant in your face discrimination in hiring has just gone underground,” McCann said.

The lead plaintiff in the PWC case, who AARP is representing, is a certified public accountant over the age of 40 who claims that he was turned down for an entry-level position at the firm because, the lawsuit says, "PWC maintains hiring policies and practices for giving preference to younger employees that result in the disproportionate employment of younger applicants."

The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) prohibits employers with 20 or more employees from discriminating against workers and job applicants who are 40 and older.

“This suit puts the PWC culture of ‘youth is good, age is bad’ under a microscope,” McGann said.

The lawsuit claims that the company almost exclusively relies on campus recruiting to fill entry-level accounting positions, focuses almost exclusively on attracting and retaining millennials and has a mandatory early retirement policy that requires partners to retire by age 60.

Forced retirement policies are lightning rods for complaints and litigation. EEOC has recently brought and settled lawsuits involving mandatory retirement policies against Johnson & Higgins for $28.1 million and Sidley and Austin for $27.5 million.

Taking heed of these legal challenges is critical to the youth-starved advisor industry, where a majority of advisors—some 40 percent—are age 55 and older and the average age is 50.1, according to statistics provided by Cerulli analyst Kenton Shirk.

The aging of American workers is not expected to let up in any of our lifetimes. Across America, workers who are 55 and older have more than doubled in the past 25 years, according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics BLS). Workers aged 65 to 74 and older are expected to grow by 75 percent by 2050, while those age 25 to 54 will grow by just 2 percent.

“There is financial accountability if you’re not hiring and promoting older workers and it is not difficult for the EEOC or plaintiffs to figure this out,” said David Gabor, a partner with the Wagner Law Group.

“Older workers are very sensitive if they see opportunities taken away from them or they’re being pushed out the door at 60 when they thought they could work until 70. They’ll go to a lawyer and the EEOC. The more employees impacted by age discrimination, the more expensive these complaints and lawsuits can be,” said Gabor who has practiced employment law for more than 20 years.

The best practices for advisor firms who want to avoid age discrimination complaints? Create and leverage the benefits of a multigenerational workforce, attorneys said.

“The tone comes from the top, so it’s important for senior management to buy into the proposition that they have to recognize, understand and reject age-related assumptions and stereotypes and build their policies and practices from there,” Gabor said.

Advertising and recruiting should be done across all generations and mediums. Tools on Facebook and other social media that allow recruiters to microtarget specific age groups are a recipe for legal trouble. It is the basis of a major class-action lawsuit brought by the Communications Workers of America.

With ads “you never want to have a maximum number of years of experience requirement,” added AARP’s McCann. “We are representing an out-of-work attorney who applied for a legal job with CareFusion [Kleber v CareFusion] and was not interviewed, despite years of valid experience.” The CareFusion job ad the plaintiff answered stipulated applicants should have no more than seven years of experience.

“It’s fine to hire someone who is a good fit for your firm, but we believe to create a black-and-white bar that clearly screens out older workers violates the law. You owe qualified job applicants an interview and you may discover that the person is the absolute best fit,” McCann said.

Hiring materials, including ads and brochures, should reflect all age groups, Gabor said. Recruiters and human resources staff should be trained to avoid not only assumptions and stereotypes based on age, but leading questions or statements that can be construed as age bias.

National restaurant chain Seasons 52 settled an EEOC lawsuit for $2.85 million earlier this year after more than 135 applicants provided sworn testimony that company managers around the country made age-related interview statements such as, “We are really looking for someone younger.”