Setting Up Junior Lawyers to Succeed
The Jamaican Bar Association has been trying for a while now to encourage established and senior lawyers to volunteer in the mentoring of newly called attorneys. A good and worthwhile effort. However, is volunteerism really the way to go? In this article, I briefly outline the merits of introducing a structured and professional approach that should be rolled out nationwide in the profession. Whether we call it mentoring, pupillage, articles, or internship, the terminology is less important than the introduction of a guided intervention where seniors in the profession, trained by professionals in the art and science of mentoring, not only impart knowledge, professionalism and ethical competence to freshly minted attorneys or law school leavers, but they also support their dreams and aspirations by helping them to navigate the inevitable emotional and psychological challenges of personal and professional growth, all the while guiding them on their journey to professional self-actualisation. They can do this because they are trained to provide support to their mentee in the form of reflective learning within the context of a formal programme.
The typical law degree excludes the many practical skills required for lawyering. For example, the intricacies of client care and ethics, guarding against being a foil for, or unwittingly participating in money laundering, and even the essential skills of business development and professional networking, are just a few of the areas typically excluded. Yet these skills are required for a well-rounded legal professional to practice according to the high standards espoused by the Bar. This is especially so when any transgressions, intentional or not, could well result in the hapless or naïve junior lawyer answering to disciplinary charges levied by the governing General Legal Council, potentially marring a promising career before it has barely begun.
There is little practical knowledge obtained before being called to the Bar since law graduates are not required to do any further formal training beyond just 10 weeks in a law firm (and there the quality of exposure varies dramatically) as well as a stipulated number and type of court room observations. To compound matters, the number of firms that do offer good training schemes, (by which is meant formal classroom sessions and on the job training in both technical knowledge and skill-building) is few and far between. The sheer oversupply of law graduates in the profession means that way too many enter the profession without any handholding whatsoever.
Mentoring can encourage an emerging leader and support his or her leadership development; it can aid in recruitment; mentoring can and does provide motivation and improved self-confidence at the critical learning stage of a mentee’s career; and mentoring can assist the mentee to navigate the culture of the profession with its strange rituals and even stranger language protocols.
In an era where consumers of legal services are becoming more demanding and are expecting those services to be performed accurately, efficiently, and to the highest of standards, surely there is a case for the profession to look at filling the inevitable gaps in training to improve the overall quality of the cohorts that start dealing with consumers? The reputation of the entire profession is judged by the standards it adheres to and there is nothing more damaging than a few ‘rogue’ attorneys to cast negative aspersions on the rest, especially when in the writer’s view, such persons would likely have been spotted by a more senior expert eye, and potentially diverted into more constructive behaviour early on.
Underestimated: The Art and Science of Mentoring
This brings me to my next point. Not all senior lawyers necessarily make good trainers or mentors. The days when good solid advice imparted by a well-meaning senior, whose authority and power to influence counts as professional mentoring, are beginning to wane. This form of transactional mentoring is characterised by one way learning; from protégé to mentee. Nowadays, a more developmental approach to mentoring has emerged and is taking hold. Now, mentoring is seen as a robust skillset learned and honed over time with the intention of building a dynamic and meaningful mentor-mentee relationship, where the emphasis is on the self-development of the mentee. For this approach, the best mentors are a combination of coach, counsellor, advisor, teacher, and therapist. However, one of their greatest gifts is their adaptability; namely the ability to transition from one role to another according to the needs of the mentee on a given day or time, the emphasis here is on the needs of the mentee. Thus, where a smart junior attorney aspires to reach the upper echelons of professional success, benevolent advice-giving, in most cases just will not cut it.
So, what else does it take to become a good, effective mentor of junior lawyers? There are several ideal qualities, though five are highlighted here.
Firstly, and perhaps this is a given, a mentor needs the knowledge that the mentee is expecting to benefit from. Knowledge here is not restricted to the subject and content of the law, but also about the wisdom of life and the business of law, about dealings with people and clients and about tackling downsides and problem-solving. Typically, an untrained mentor will pour out his or her life experiences in the hope that the mentee will catch on and learn the same lessons he or she learned. This is largely a waste of time. It may capture the junior’s interest, depending upon how good a storyteller the senior is, but it does nothing to build the mentee’s own capabilities for resilience, empathy, courage or host of qualities and characteristics that must be mastered to be successful in a complex professional endeavour such as modern-day legal practice.
Secondly, mentors need to be engaged and be genuinely interested in the whole roundedness of a mentee. It is important that mentors care about the mentee’s dreams, ambitions, and health, in the wider sense. Trained mentors can detect when something is unsettling the mentee and are armed with tools and resources to help the mentee transition through to the other side of a problem, where hopefully, success awaits. These tools and resources usually must be learned.
Thirdly, one must be available, and here I mean emotionally and psychologically available. I also mean honest, authentic, and present. This may be the biggest challenge of all, since many senior lawyers did not have the benefit of such open and authentic tutelage themselves and were either left to navigate the vagaries of professional life alone or experienced a benevolent but emotionally absent principal or senior and therefore scarcely know how to offer such high levels of availability of self, since it was never demonstrated to them.
Then, of course, there is the business of time availability. Let us face it, successful seniors are busy people. Without training, they will not have the skill of effective mentoring which when done well, need not run into hours, and can be easily achieved by a commitment of no more than thirty minutes to perhaps one hour a week.
Fourthly, mentors require a significant level of self-awareness – they must be able to recognise and manage their own emotions and behaviour as distinct from their mentees and be able to utilise empathy appropriately. Emotional intelligence is an important component as it not only assists the mentor to recognise and manage his or her own emotions, it facilitates the understanding of how mentees behave and why they do. It is also essential for building rapport especially in the early stages of the mentor-mentee relationship; predicting and drawing to a mentee’s attention the potential consequences of certain behaviours for the mentee’s consideration; and relationship management, especially the termination stage which marks the end of the mentoring relationship, and which can be fraught if not handled well.
And finally, mentors must have excellent communication skills, including the ability to listen well with an open mind, recognise visual and non-verbal cues as to what a mentee may not be saying, use of appropriate language, being unafraid of silence and use of own body language to convey meaning. Lawyers are generally regarded as good communicators, but the communication skills required of a courtroom advocate are a far cry from the multiple inter-personal communication skills needed to support a junior lawyer during what is arguably the most delicate stage of his or her career from a developmental perspective. These first two years of practice will likely shape the junior’s career for the next thirty years!
What Professional Mentoring Can Bring to the Legal Profession
There is a wealth of literature on the benefits of mentoring in the legal field especially from America, Canada, and the UK where there is a long tradition of its practice in the profession. The American Bar Association espouses it and monitors the success of formal programmes. 2Civility is just one example of an Illinois based organised and structured mentoring programme.
Mentors play a part in showing how to develop leadership skills, and if one aspires to being a general counsel, a department head, or a managing partner, watching mentor seniors already occupying those positions interact with others and the responses they engender through those interactions are valuable learning tools especially when enhanced as discussion points one on one or in cross-dimensional mentoring sessions.
Mentors also keep their mentees motivated in a profession that is highly stressful and sometimes unforgiving. According to a study published in the late 1990s by the US-based National Association of Law Placement, associates were leaving firms mainly because they did not receive the mentoring that they needed and wanted. Bear in mind that junior lawyers may not even be able to consciously identify a need for mentoring, but they know they are experiencing dissatisfaction, discomfort and feel that their only option is to leave. A good mentoring programme provides a safe space to share concerns in a supportive relationship that potentially opens a world of possibilities.
A well-managed national mentoring programme could offer opportunities to mentees to develop networks of mentors giving enthusiastic juniors access to varying specialities and competencies. And what about the seniors who might learn a thing or two from their juniors, in say technology or social media use? Peer-led (where mentees get together to guide one another) and upward (or reverse) mentoring (where younger ‘mentors’ have a skill set to teach older ‘mentees’ thus switching around the typical roles) are becoming increasingly popular in the technological industries, why not law too?
Advice to the Bar Association
The development of a strong and structured mentoring programme requires more than goodwill and desire. It necessitates professional design to ensure that mentor and mentee are selected and matched by their respective needs, interests, and capabilities; that there is a clear purpose for both mentor and mentee; and a strong sense of direction for the programme; as well as the initial and ongoing training of suitable candidates as mentors. It is the writer’s view that training is one of the most important features of a well-run programme; since it can weed out persons unsuited to mentoring, either because they have dubious or manipulative intentions or because they have unresolved problems of their own that it would be unwise to expose a junior person to.
In addition, mentees require orientation, even training so that they can access the likely benefits of such a relationship, and do not misread it as an opportunity to relieve themselves of the responsibilities and competencies they must bring. For instance, a mentee must exhibit the intelligence required to pursue a challenging law career; the ambition and drive to channel his or her abilities in career advancement; and, like the mentor (even if not to the same degree), possess strong inter-personal skills. It helps if the mentee has a general all-round inclination for hard work, enthusiasm, and demonstrable ability.
These requirements underscore the importance of a robust programme structure. But there are more requirements. What about the need to ensure social inclusion i.e., ensuring that candidates of differing backgrounds, talents and experience are afforded equal opportunities in the search for that scarce breed of human being known as a mentor? Diversity mentoring brings its own unique challenges that can be anticipated and addressed by a competent programme manager.
The larger, better resourced firms will always be able to attract and retain the brightest juniors who demonstrate the potential to be high-flyers. Mentors for those candidates are likely accessible from within the firm’s ranks. But what about the more modestly qualified candidates, or those without the connections of socially well-positioned family members, who simply cannot out-compete their smarter and connected counterparts for places in the larger firms, but who with encouragement and support might also make fine lawyers? Who will mentor these would-be lawyers?
Hence, I am advocating the introduction of a profession-wide scheme with the advantage that mentees can learn from a wide cross section of lawyers, and where the mentor is not necessarily the manager or employer of the mentee. After all, it is sometimes difficult to fully open to one’s manager when it may have implications for one’s job!
There are other motivations for introducing profession-wide mentoring. Like many other jurisdictions, the move to liberalise the profession has led to its expansion, with more schools both local and overseas offering courses that lead to the necessary certification to become lawyers. In just two academic years, 2011/12 to 2013/14, enrolment at the law school grew by a staggering 22%! This reflects the demand for legal studies, which is not however necessarily reflected in the opportunities for employment upon graduation, whether in the public or private sector. If this trend is to continue, the profession generally, and the Bar Association in particular, owes it to these candidates to facilitate their translation of theoretical knowledge into practical skills that can enable candidates to gainfully serve society.
Any programme that is introduced needs to be periodically evaluated to ensure that it is delivering a mentoring experience that aligns to its purpose and other key success measures. Perhaps one measure of success would be when we see well mentored individuals paying it forward by becoming mentors themselves.
Finally, thought needs to be brought to bear on how this approach to up-skilling is to be paid for. One way might be to seek sponsorship from the larger law firms. Alternatively, or in addition, what about requiring juniors benefitting from formal mentoring to give up a portion of their remuneration to a general mentoring fund, which is in turn drawn on by sole practitioner mentor lawyers or those from small firms (who might otherwise not have the resources to ‘employ’ a junior), to offer a stipend to their mentee juniors? Or, maybe we ask all firms to pay a means based amount into a mentoring fund to fund such a programme. The idea of a social fund is not new; it was proposed a while ago as a self-insurance mechanism to compensate victims of legal negligence.
However the programme is to be structured, financing it is essential, since it is the writer’s contention that leaving the process entirely to volunteerism is unlikely to yield the developmental results we all want.
‘If developed correctly’ Jenn Labin, an expert in the administration of structured mentoring programmes says, ‘mentoring programmes have the potential to be the most effective tool in your talent development kit. Mentoring relationships are highly impactful’, she says. ‘They drive results, challenge talent and change careers for the better.’ Now why wouldn’t we want these results for our junior lawyers and the profession?
Adapted from an article written by the author and published in the Jamaican Gleaner on 15th March 2020
