St. Thomas Law Mentor Blog

We all want our lives to go the way we plan.  It seldom does though.  The same is true for mentor relationships.  We go into the relationship with our idea of what it should look like and how it should proceed.  Sometimes, though, we have to be ready to adjust our plan and deal with the unexpected.

Scheduling Conflicts

In a perfect world every meeting would go off as scheduled.  Lawyers seldom live in that world.  Clients have emergencies; court appearances need to be covered, to say nothing of the ordinary life hassles that befall all of us from time to time like.  Students are understandably frustrated when a mentor has to reschedule a meeting.  Sometimes, though, they misinterpret the scheduling problems to be a sign that the mentor does not care.  That can be compounded if the mentor has to reschedule multiple times.  From a protégé perspective, it is crucial to understand the realities of the mentor’s world and to accept the mentor’s explanation for the re-scheduling.

Personality Conflicts

Sometimes the mentor assigned in a formal program does not match your vision of what she should be.  Perhaps she has different politics than yours.  Maybe she uses language you wouldn’t personally choose.  She may be overtly religious while you are not.  It is easy to be thrown by these differences especially early in the relationship.  It can be tempting to seek the easy way out by asking for a new mentor or refusing to invest in the relationship.  However, adjusting to the unexpected can yield unexpected benefits.  Most of life is about working effectively with people.  That includes people who are different than we are.  What better practice than in a mentor relationship?  Indeed, your mentor is also role-modeling dealing with the differences in how she interacts with you.

Other Unexpected Changes

After supervising thousands of mentor relationships in the past five years one thing is certain, there will always be changes.  Mentors and students change jobs or areas of interest.  Mentors and students’ family circumstances change.  Every change alters our plan for how the relationship should look going forward, but every change is also an opportunity.  For example, one year a mentor changed firms in the middle of the year.  Rather than asking for a new mentor, the student decided to take advantage of the unexpected.  He and his mentor met three times over the month his mentor moved and discussed how lawyers change firms.  The student ended up with valuable information and a lesson in professionalism from a mentor who handled a job change right.  The mentor commented to me afterward about what a good experience he had working with the student.

The bottom line with mentor relationships is that adaptation matters.  Adjust to the unexpected and you may get even more out of your mentor relationship than you originally planned.

Nearly two years ago I attended a conference at the University of South Carolina about mentoring as the future of the legal profession.  The conference was well attended and was a great chance to share ideas about mentoring with other lawyers from around the county.  I came away from the conference energized both about the interest in mentoring and about how much UST has to offer.  Our mentor program is well recognized for its excellence.  I think we have a lot to share about mentoring.  At the same time, I think we also have a lot to learn from others who are interested in mentoring both in the legal profession and outside it.  This blog is a step to do both.

The plan right now is that I will be the lead contributor to the blog.  I have run the UST mentor program from nearly five years now.  I plan to blog on topics related to how to build and manage a formal mentor program, how to pair mentors and protégés, how to be a good mentor, how to be a good protégé, and other topics that come up either in the classroom component of our program or in the fieldwork component.  Classroom topics generally relate to the relationships lawyers are asked to manage and to the professional skills lawyers need to develop to manage those relationships.

The blog is not simply my voice however.  We have a panel of other contributors who will share their thoughts.  Assistant Dean Lisa Brabbit been involved in the UST mentor program for several years and will offer her thoughts on some of the above topics.  She has extensive background on gender issues and will also be able to offer insight into how gender impacts the legal profession and mentor relationships.  Additionally, we will have guest posts from UST Law students about their own experiences with mentoring.  They will share their thoughts about the challenges and successes that go with being a great protégé.  I hope their contributions lend some insight into what the participants in this type of program want from their mentors and what they can give back to the relationships.  I will also be inviting mentors to share their thoughts on what it is like to be a mentor.

I hope that you, as readers, will also join in.  The best blogs are really a conversation between the bloggers and the readers.  I welcome your thoughts and comments on the topics.
I will post our first blog soon.  The initial blog will be on the challenge of pairing mentor and protégés and my thoughts on that process.  We also have an early blog entry in the works from a student contributor on preparing for the first meeting with a new mentor.  If you have topics of interest feel free to post them in the comments.

Student contributor Adam recently posted his thoughts about how students prepare for their first meeting with a new mentor. I want to offer my thoughts on that topic both from the perspective of a program administrator but also from the perspective of someone who has served as an attorney mentor for five years.

From the mentor’s perspective I want the student to arrive with at our first meeting with a well thought out plan outlining what they want to accomplish in the program. As a mentor I was willing to be as invested as the student wanted me to be but I wanted it to be directed towards advancing the student’s interests and professional development rather than asking me to guess what the student wanted. So, my first piece of advice for students entering a new mentor relationship to give careful thought to what it is you are looking for. Are you looking primarily for career mentoring (training in the specific skills needed for your practice area) or are you looking for psychosocial mentoring (someone to help encourage you and build you up as you enter the legal profession) or some combination of both?

Once I know what the new protégé wants out of the relationship I can assess what I can provide. As with any mentor, I have my own strengths and weaknesses. Once I know what the protégé wants I can assess how well my strengths match with the protégé’s needs. Perhaps I can also point out some areas of strength where I can help the protégé that the protégé has not yet thought of.

I also recommend researching the mentor as much as possible before the first meeting. Researching the mentor gives you some background information on the mentor’s practice area that can be helpful to identity the types of career mentoring that mentor can offer. It also gives you some insight into some basic networking the mentor can assist you with. More importantly, diligently researching the mentor can provide easy opportunities for conversation starters. You can ask a mentor about a particular case or client. Finally, your initial research shows that you are invested with the relationship before ever meeting the mentor. A student who has invested time into researching the mentor provides evidence into the relationship itself. It immediately puts you in a positive light with your new mentor.

A final tip for preparing for that first meeting. Be sure to research where the mentor’s office is located and how long it will take you to get there. Lawyers are busy people and nothing is more galling then feeling like you are wasting time waiting for a protégé who is late. If you need to drive to your mentor’s office evaluate how long the drive is and add in some extra travel time in case you run into traffic. It is far easier to arrive at your destination early and review your notes in the car or the lobby than it is to arrive late. Similarly once you have arrived at the mentor’s office be conscious that the mentor’s professional staff will play a role in your mentor relationship. Be polite and courteous to everyone you meet. Often your mentor will ask for and value the input support staff offers about the people the mentor meets.

One of the key challenges for a successful formal mentor program is pairing mentors and protégées together. Having paired students with mentors for five years now, I often describe the process as sixty percent science and forty percent art. Putting significant time and care into the pairings process will yield results during the program year.

The sixty percent science in pairing students is developing as much information as you can about both the mentor and the student. In our program we have a detailed database with information provided by our mentors. Anytime we get additional information from our mentors we add it to our database. The database includes the mentor’s professional activities and interests, location, practice setting, schools they attended, any hobbies and outside activities they have identified an interest in, as well as any notes that the mentor may have provided to us.

Similarly, we ask our students to give us as much information as they are comfortable with to facilitate the pairings process. Often for our law students the most important consideration for them is the mentor’s practice area. However, there are students for whom other aspects of a mentor relationship would be more important to them including practice setting, location, gender, or family status.

After we have collected as much information as we can our pairings process takes us three to four weeks. We carefully evaluate and match the information provided by the mentors and students to try to find the best mentor match for each student. However, this is where the forty percent art sometimes comes into play. It is important to know the protégées and mentors personally. Sometimes two people who seem to match well on paper may not match up well due to personality reasons. For example, if both the mentor and protégée are introverts it can be difficult to get the relationship up and running. Similarly, even if the practice area the student requested and the mentor provides are a perfect match there are secondary considerations that can facilitate a better mentor relationship. All things being equal I try to pair a student no more than one suburb away from the school or where they live to ease the travel burden. Additionally, I look for common areas of interest whether it be undergraduate institution, hobbies, or something else that will facilitate a conversation between the two as they are first meeting. My goal is always to make the first meeting between a protégée and a new mentor as comfortable as possible for both.

Having said all of the above pairing students and mentors in a formal program is an imperfect activity. From the perspective of administrating a formal program no matter how much time and energy you have invested into the pairing process you must always be open to the possibility that the relationship does not work out quite right. I try to communicate to those students and mentors if the pairing is not a good fit we can always repair the student with a new mentor the mentor with a new student and each year we do just that. Investing a significant amount of time in the pairings process can reduce the number of re-pairings you have to do each year but there are too many human factors to get every pairing one-hundred percent correct.