Ostrow dispensed such tips as “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll be following someone else’s agenda” and “You have to find what interests you. . . . You need to know your values and what’s important to you. . . . You need to know your strengths.”
The attorneys scribbled notes and asked questions.
“How do you deal with taking a significant pay cut when changing jobs?”
“How do you know when to stop thinking about change and actually take action?”
“How do you deal with lack of experience when changing practice areas?”
This scene may not appear to have much to do with the act of mentoring itself, but it illustrates the desire that attorneys, particularly young attorneys, have for career-related feedback and advice and the pervasiveness of job dissatisfaction, both of which have very much to do with mentoring.
To Guide and Instruct
Throughout the history of the legal profession, mentoring has played
an important and sometimes integral role, at one time providing the
only way for individuals to learn and practice the law.
The changing state of the legal profession has meant changes for mentoring as well. With law schools becoming the standard route to the trade and the profession becoming more of a business, mentoring has taken a back seat to other concerns.
Yet interest in mentoring persists, and has grown in recent years as those in the field have come to recognize the important role it plays in providing a more highly skilled and more professionally satisfied attorney.
The word mentor can be traced back to ancient Greek, to Homer’s Odyssey, in which Mentor, an old and wise friend of Odysseus’s, is entrusted to guide and tutor the warrior’s son, Telemachus, while he is away fighting the Trojan War.
The modern legal profession may be worlds apart from ancient Greece, but the need for a Mentor-like figure to guide and instruct has never diminished.
Useful in many professions, mentoring is especially beneficial for lawyers because they work in a highly skilled profession where mistakes can cost dearly and ethical considerations must be weighed constantly. A mentor can provide young lawyers with valuable assistance as they navigate the often intimidating and overwhelming transition from law school to law firm, and provide midlevel and even senior attorneys with a way to improve their legal skills, seek advice about finding a work–life balance, or ponder a career change.
For some the prospect of finding a successful mentoring relationship can seem daunting, but there are numerous and varied options available for those willing to make the effort. An increasing number of firms offer formal mentoring programs that pair junior and senior lawyers together, and many voluntary bars offer informal mentoring relationships or related programs.
Making the Transition
Mentoring
has changed since the days of one-on-one with a much senior attorney
or judge, something Philip Lacovara, senior counsel at Mayer, Brown,
Rowe & Maw LLP in New York, remembers doing when he began his legal
career.
“I had the good fortune to learn at the elbow of a number of terrific lawyers, both in public service and in private practice, lawyers who had gone up the old-fashioned method and who understood the importance of trying to pass along to me the benefit of what they’d seen and done.”
Lacovara laments the passing of young attorneys being able to sit with a senior partner or judge and go over drafts line by line and listen to how a presentation could be made more powerful or how something could be expressed more effectively.
“Law firms were smaller than they are now, which meant that there were many more personal relationships. When I graduated from law school, a megafirm had a hundred lawyers, and therefore when you joined that firm there were a small number of partners in your discipline and a small number of associates, and it was easy to develop that kind of personal mentoring relationship.”
Transitioning from studying about law to practicing it could be smoother and less stressful for students if they only had mentors along the way. Law schools often try to provide students with real-world experience through clinics and internships, yet these activities are unlikely to fully prepare a student to deal with legal technicalities, attorney–client relationships, ethical dilemmas, or office politics.
“You’re so overwhelmed when you’re starting,” says Jessica Rosenbaum, vice president of the board of directors of the Washington Council of Lawyers. “You’re learning how to talk to clients, where to stand in court, how to litigate.”
“The craft has to be taught,” says Lacovara. “In law school one learns the science of law, that is, the technical body of law and some approach to legal reasoning, but the actual practice comes from learning, either figuratively or literally, at the elbow of a more experienced lawyer.
“There’s a good deal of frustration among younger lawyers, particularly when they don’t seem to be getting any kind of personal guidance or counseling from their professional seniors. . . . [The legal profession] is dependent on more senior people passing along experience, wisdom, insight, and judgment as part of the process of training younger lawyers, and when that part of the practice of law breaks down or evaporates, it leaves the younger lawyers lost and more frustrated.”
Large-Firm Mentoring Programs
That is not to say, however, there is no training or assistance in place
for young attorneys entering the legal profession. At his firm Lacovara
helps oversee the training of new associates through, for example, programs
on effective legal writing and oral advocacy.
An increasing number of large firms have instituted formal mentoring programs to address the needs of first-year associates. One is McDermott, Will & Emery LLP. Just over two years ago the firm started a professional development program, called McDermott University, that is built around four key components: identification of core skills, training, mentoring, and career development plans.
“We believe that mentoring is a critical part of everything else that is happening. Every associate has a mentor,” says Lisa Horowitz, the firm’s senior manager of professional development.
When an associate joins the firm, he or she is given an “integration buddy” for the first six months before joining the firmwide mentoring program. The mentoring opportunity is also extended to summer associates.
Horowitz says that mentoring relationships are most often successful when centered on a task, such as creating a career plan or working on a pro bono project together.
Associates are asked if there is a particular person they would like to have as a mentor. If no preference is voiced, pairings are made on the basis of needs and common interests. Pairings are reviewed annually by each department’s working group, which is made up of representatives from all of the department’s offices.
There is no schedule as to how often and under what circumstances the mentor and mentee must meet. However, some of the offices host events to promote relationships, and mentors are provided with a small budget for taking mentees out to lunch.
Though mentoring is just a part of the firm’s overall professional development effort, Horowitz describes it as “the glue that sort of holds the program together.”
“Research suggests that mentoring is second to education in terms of an attorney’s success,” she says. “Clearly it impacts productivity, and I hope it also impacts how people feel about belonging to the firm. Certainly your own professional development is enhanced by having a mentor, by having training and a career plan with goals and active steps and someone who can help you with that.”
Arnold & Porter LLP is another firm that has a mentoring program in place, one that is in the midst of being reevaluated.
Change is nothing new for the firm’s mentoring and professional development efforts, says its professional development director, Caren Ulrich Stacy. “It needs to be very dynamic and based on what’s going on in the marketplace and what’s going on in the firm, as well as on the needs of the mentors and mentees, which changes along with all the other changes.”
Assessing these changes has led the firm to create several different mentoring programs and contemplate moving toward cluster arrangements, which would place several associates with several partners in one group.
Currently, new associates, whether coming from law school or as lateral hires, are paired with midlevel associates to, as Ulrich Stacy describes, “begin navigating the waters of Arnold & Porter.” Midlevel associates are paired with partners because “the midlevel associates are starting to look at things other than acclimating to firm life.”
The firm also has an ombudsman program in place in which the associates elect two partners from each office to serve as “ombuddies” who can provide confidential, one-on-one mentoring on an as-needed basis.
Minorities have two mentoring opportunities at the firm: the MAP (Minorities at Arnold & Porter) mentoring program, in which minority associates are paired with minority partners, and the D.C. Minority Networking Series, which the firm created in association with Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP. The latter brings together minority lawyers from the public and private sectors four times a year for a chance to network and create mentoring relationships.
As for the latest possible changes, Ulrich Stacy says they are coming about because the firm noticed that the newest generation of associates, the “Xers” and “Millennials,” tend to follow nonlinear career paths that don’t have making partner as the only goal, as it was with previous generations.
“We feel that they have to connect with as many different people as possible so they get what they need from that person at that time.”
No matter what the change, she says, there are some elements of mentoring that will stay the same regardless of the type of program in place: having an individualized approach to the pairing; monitoring the relationship; establishing guidelines, expectations, and a plan of action; and training.
Mentoring at Voluntary Bars
Where mentoring opportunities are lacking or unrewarding, attorneys
may turn to voluntary bars for assistance.
The Washington Council of Lawyers (WCL) recently put together a mentoring program to assist public interest fellows and attorneys.
“The impetus of the program,” says Rosenbaum, “was the realization that D.C. is flooded with new fellows and new public interest lawyers every year, and while they get integrated into their own organization and the unique world that they’re in—the civil rights world, the domestic violence world—they don’t necessarily have access to the larger public interest community.”
Rosenbaum says that when she was on a fellowship she found great support at her organization and from the legal service community in general, but in retrospect she wishes she had more exposure to lawyers doing public interest work in other areas.
“It’s a very close-knit public interest community here and everyone is helpful, but when you’re a new lawyer or a new fellow, you’re intimidated, and we wanted to cut past all that and get people integrated right away.”
The program began last fall with a session titled “How to Survive Your Fellowship Year,” which set an informal tone that Rosenbaum believes made the new associates and senior lawyers feel more comfortable.
“I and a few other former fellows talked about our worst and most humiliating moments of our fellowship year. It just demystified the whole thing and let [the participants] know they didn’t have to fake it in this room.”
Through WCL’s mentoring program, new public interest fellows and lawyers are paired with senior lawyers from the council’s board of directors, and the team is expected to attend a series of informative sessions every other month about such topics as how to work with the media and how to raise funds for an organization.
Rosenbaum thinks the informal structure of the program makes it easier for people, especially senior lawyers, to participate, since they don’t have to worry about a regimented schedule that they might not be able to keep. And some mentors and mentees are meeting outside WCL events—a trend that Rosenbaum hopes will grow along with the program.
Like the WCL, the Washington Metropolitan Area Corporate Counsel Association (WMACCA) concentrates on a specific segment of the legal population. It currently has more than 1,300 members from over 500 corporations and private sector organizations.
Although WMACCA does not have a formal mentoring program in place, it offers numerous educational and networking opportunities for its members that provide not only professional development assistance but the chance to meet others in the field and build mentoring relationships.
“I think the term mentoring can encompass a whole host of relationships,” says WMACCA President Eric Reicin. “For in-house counsel, mentoring may include talking to fellow in-house counsel at their companies or other companies, or outside counsel, but it also can often involve senior business leaders instead of senior attorneys.”
One way WMACCA assists members is through its Career Development Forum, which helps individuals make the transition between jobs through programs on writing résumés and interviewing skills, an electronic chat room, and job leads. Other forums, such as the Employment and Labor Forum and Litigation Forum, both of which hold between 6 and 10 events a year, provide another means of meeting in-house counsel who specialize in particular fields.
“As many in-house counsel work in smaller departments where there are one to five attorneys, the forums offer opportunities to build relationships and become an informal mentoring network for this particular legal specialty,” says Reicin.
The association hosts several other social events and offers more than 60 continuing education courses.
WMACCA also tries to increase awareness of in-house counsel practice among law students through panel presentations at area law schools, as well as by having its members be guest speakers at law school classes. A fall symposium will provide law students and first-year firm associates practical advice about working with and the expectations of in-house counsel.
In addition, WMACCA sponsors the Corporate Scholars Program, which provides law students with internships in the legal departments of some of its member organizations, such as Sodexho, US Airways, and Lockheed Martin, allowing them the chance to experience and observe a career option they might not have exposure to in law school.
The Department of Justice, the world’s largest legal employer, offers mentoring programs for its attorneys, but also has several affinity groups within the department that can provide further assistance and outreach to minorities. One of these groups is the Department of Justice Association of Black Attorneys (DOJABA), which has approximately 200 members nationwide.
DOJABA may not have a formal mentoring program in place, but its does provide access to department attorneys through brown-bag luncheons, listservs, and social events. One of the group’s focuses has been to reach out to minority law students.
“One
of the challenges of working in the government is trying to get your
foot in the door,” says association chair Lisa Taylor. “While
we’re in D.C. and there are a lot of opportunities, I think it’s
very difficult sometimes to get into the department coming from law
school. We kind of enlighten students as to what we did to get where
we’re at and what the recommended course of action is. [The department]
has a recruitment office, but they’re going to give [the students]
an overview—the department has 9,000 attorneys, so it’s
going to be a wide perspective—whereas we might be able to give
a more personalized perspective and allow them to contact someone in
a particular division or unit.”
DOJABA also provides assistance to members looking to change jobs within the department. “Someone might be in the education division and might want to talk to someone in disability rights to find out more about it, and we offer them that opportunity,” says Taylor.
Women, Minorities, and Mentoring
Members of DOJABA are given the opportunity to associate more closely
with other attorneys of color at the Department of Justice.
“It’s nice to meet others who have similar backgrounds and who have experienced similar things because of their race,” says DOJABA Secretary Tamara Kassabian. “Sometimes you’re the only minority in your office, and I think this organization provides a way for to you to connect with others and feel more like there’s a community.”
Minorities often have more difficulty finding a suitable mentor because there are so few minorities in leadership positions in the legal profession. According to a recent report by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), in 2005 attorneys of color made up only 4.63 percent of partners at large firms and 15.62 percent of associate or other senior positions.
In an attempt to recruit and retain more attorneys of color, some firms have established minority mentoring programs, such as that at Arnold & Porter.
Some voluntary bars, particularly those dedicated to serving minorities—such as the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of the Greater Washington, DC Area; the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Attorneys of Washington, or GAYLAW; and the Greater Washington Area Chapter of the Women Lawyers Division of the National Bar Association—try to address the needs of their minority members through informal mentoring programs.
The Hispanic Bar Association (HBA) of the District of Columbia has a longstanding mentoring program, cosponsored by Arnold & Porter, that focuses on the local Latino law school population.
“The number of Latinos in law school is not high, and it’s a matter of getting to these students early and seeing them to graduation and providing career help,” says HBA Vice President Kenia Seoane. “A lot of these students are the first generation to go to law school and they don’t know anybody in the legal profession.”
To recruit mentors the association makes appeals through its newsletter and holds an annual drive at Arnold & Porter in the fall.
Students are asked about their preferences before being paired with an attorney, who is usually involved in an area of practice in which the student is interested, or who perhaps attended the same law school or is from the same hometown. There is no structure in place that dictates how often the pair should meet, but the HBA suggests that they meet face to face at least once a month, and it regularly holds events to help facilitate the relationship.
One such event was a well-received panel featuring U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan and D.C. Superior Court Judges Eugene N. Hamilton, José M. López, and Aida L. Melendez discussing judicial clerkships, for which the HBA would like to see more Latinos apply.
“When
I was a clerk at the D.C. Superior Court, I was the only Latino clerk
that I knew of,” says Seoane. “I thought, ‘We’re
not even applying, that’s the problem.’ Some of these Latino
judges would like to hire Latino clerks if they could have a good pool
of candidates to choose from.”
Limited resources prevent the HBA from having an additional mentoring program for practicing attorneys; however, the association’s members do meet regularly for happy hours and networking events. Says Seoane, “Although it’s not a structured program, you can still be part of a professional community that can be there as a resource.”
Both Seoane and Taylor credit much of their own involvement and success in the legal profession to mentors. Seoane began a mentoring relationship with HBA past president Susan Santana before she even went to law school and that continues to this day.
“She took me under her wing and helped me with everything, from my school application to deciding what schools to apply to and where to work during the summer. Had I not had that mentoring relationship, it would have been a lot harder for me. I had no frame of reference and I had no one to ask questions about law school.”
Santana also recruited Seoane to join the board of the HBA.
Taylor says having mentors helped to shape her goals and objectives. “This was my first job out of law school, and I didn’t really have an idea of what made a successful department attorney. I happened to have a very well respected attorney in my office who has been here for 35 years and a known civil rights leader, and I was able to work with him to develop not only my legal skills but also my leadership skills.”
Women face similar problems as minorities when it comes to finding a mentor. The same NALP study found that women made up only 17.29 percent of partners at firms and 44.12 percent of associates or those in senior positions.
“One thing that we are seeing is that men typically have more opportunities to be mentored because there are more men than women in the higher ranks of the legal profession,” says Mary Legg, chair of the Women Bar Association’s Career Development Committee. “There are a lot of issues not covered in law school that you need to know once you’re in a law firm, and if there are only three women partners or three female senior associates, it’s hard to get that assistance.”
The association’s mentoring program is focused on addressing broader career and life decisions rather than substantive legal issues. Work–life issues are often of greater concern to women attorneys because, as Ellen Ostrow points out, “women take the majority of home life responsibilities.”
Legg
says that although women need not restrict themselves to having only
female mentors, they can benefit from having a colleague of the same
sex with whom to discuss such personal matters as having children and
how to dress appropriately for a certain event. She says such issues
may not be addressed in a formal mentoring relationship at a firm, where
women attorneys generally “don’t have someone with the hindsight
of 20 years’ experience who they can go to and ask about these
particular situations.”
Adapting the concept of speed dating, in which participants are encouraged to meet as many people as possible in a short period, the Women’s Bar Association conducted a program in March at the firm of Howrey LLP to promote mentorships. In this speed-mentoring session, junior attorneys were given 10 minutes to talk to a senior lawyer before being signaled to move on to the next senior lawyer. The hope was, as with dating, that some individuals would bond to form a more lasting relationship, in this case a mentoring relationship.
Nathalie Gilfoyle, counsel for the American Psychological Association and a member of the D.C. Bar’s Board of Governors, participated in a similar session held by the Young Practitioners Committee of the Bar’s Health Law Section.
“I had some follow-up with one young lawyer who was interested in discussing career options, and I think I was helpful to him in talking about the broad array of what’s out there in the legal world, and I think I was helpful in bringing in some of my own life experiences. I’m not from his firm and I don’t have an interest in his particular area of practice, but I think it can be good just to talk about the many ways you can be a good and happy lawyer.”
Making Mentoring Work
As
Gilfoyle’s experience demonstrates, a mentor does not have to
be from the mentee’s law firm or in the same area of practice
in order to provide valuable advice and assistance. When she first practiced
law, some of the best advice she received was from secretaries who “had
been around a long time and knew a lot.”
“You can look for mentors in all areas of practice,” she
says. “It’s really about somebody who knows more than you
do. . . . It can even be the opposing counsel in a case.”
Gilfoyle recommends that attorneys in search of mentors also look beyond formal programs.
“It helps to have relationships with people at different tiers of their careers—a very senior lawyer will help you in ways a junior lawyer cannot, and vice versa. Also, an assigned mentor at the firm is going to have the firm’s interests at heart, which may be appropriate if you want to succeed within the firm, but you may also want to have an external mentor with whom you can talk about issues you wouldn’t want to discuss with someone at your firm.”
She suggests that young attorneys be on the lookout for possible mentors at every opportunity, that they take on more responsibility for finding mentors and establish the structure and goals of the relationship early on.
As a career coach, Ostrow often advises her clients to put together a “personal advisory board” made up of various mentors, because not every individual on the board will be able to attend to the mentee’s needs at any given moment, and the diversity of mentors will broaden the mentee’s learning experience.
“You might look to one person for help with your legal writing skills, another person for help with your business development skills, somebody for your trial advocacy skills, and someone else to help you figure out the politics of your organization,” says Ostrow.
Tamara Kassabian found that having several mentors helped ease the transition from firm to government practice.
“I had an official mentor through the DOJ’s official program, but I also had all kinds of mentors. I had an attorney from my former firm who also moved to the government, I had Lisa [Taylor], who interviewed me, and I had an experienced civil rights officer in our office. I found different mentors at all levels. It’s not found all in one person. I think you have to find different people who will help you and lead you in the right direction.”
Having multiple mentors can also be beneficial if an arranged mentoring relationship does not work out.
Although mentoring programs attempt to bring together individuals on the bases of common legal practice, background, and interests, there is no guarantee a pairing will be successful.
“The hardest part can be accepting the fact that not every relationship is going to turn out great,” says Seoane. “It’s just an issue of compatibility, just like with any relationship, and if it doesn’t work out and you’d be more compatible with someone else, there’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘Hey, my mentor’s not working out for me, can you give me someone else?’ ”
When a mentoring relationship is successful, however, it can benefit not only the individuals involved but also the places at which the attorneys work, and even the legal profession in general.
The increasingly complicated and fast-paced legal world of today means that mentors are needed as much as, if not more than, they were when the traditional style of mentoring that Philip Lacovara experienced was a standard part of the legal profession.
In the absence of the traditional, time-intensive, one-on-one form of mentoring, lawyers today must take more initiative and think outside the box when looking for mentoring opportunities. The effort can be well rewarded, and may not be as difficult as some might think.
“I think there are many ways to do it. The key is just to try some of them,” says Gilfoyle. “There’s a rich variety, and I think there’s something out there for everyone.”
Kathryn Alfisi is a staff writer for the D.C. Bar.
