Mentoring: Now more than ever

By Holly Fujie
President, State Bar of California

Fujie

Starting the practice of law after passing the bar can be like moving to a country where you understand none of the customs and very little of the language. Changing practice areas or opening your own office, even when you have been in practice for years, can also leave you with many questions for which you may not know where to turn for answers. For lawyers facing such difficult situations, having an experienced mentor to consult can make all the difference in whether they succeed or fail in the profession, and from a personal perspective, whether they have a satisfying or a disappointing career.

When the bar was smaller and entering classes in even large firms numbered in the dozens rather than the hundreds, getting a mentor may not have required outside intervention. Mentorship evolved more naturally from working relationships and shared interests. And for those outside the mainstream of practice, there were specialty bars and organizations that could provide mentors — again on an informal basis. These days, bar associations are stepping up and creating mentoring programs to provide guidance to both new lawyers and experienced attorneys moving into new types of practices.

I first became involved in organized mentoring programs a number of years ago while on the Board of Governors of the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles (WLALA, wlala.org). WLALA recognized the need to encourage newer lawyers to participate in its activities by providing a formal mentor who would be able not only to provide advice on the practice of law but also to introduce her mentee to WLALA and to get her comfortable and involved with the organization. Through my work chairing that committee and assigning mentors to mentees (keeping the best for myself, of course), I saw firsthand how mentoring affects the careers and lives of both mentee and mentor, and I became a huge fan of organized mentoring programs. I mentored dozens of young lawyers and had the pleasure of seeing them succeed in the profession and become leaders in the bar. Through my bar activities, I became aware of other bar mentoring programs and was impressed by their high degree of effectiveness.

When I became president of the State Bar, one of my goals was to work with the California Young Lawyers Association (CYLA) to gather information on mentoring programs offered to California lawyers so it could eventually be put on the bar’s Web site for easy access. To this end, besides gathering information on existing programs of local bars like the San Diego County Bar’s popular and effective Lyceum program (sdcba.org/index.cfm?pg=MentorProgram), I have been encouraging the local and specialty bars to create mentoring programs if they do not have one, and the bars have responded enthusiastically.

Along the way, I have learned that there are many types of mentoring programs that approach the concept from many different perspectives. A great example of an innovative new approach geared to younger, more tech-savvy lawyers, is the web-based “OCBA Mentor on Demand” (mentorondemand.org/about.asp), which is only one of the successful mentoring programs the Orange County Bar Association has designed exclusively for its Young Lawyers Division. For those mentors worried about having to commit to mentoring for an extended period of time, there are programs like “Speed Mentoring,” which was offered at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Boston. This program is a one-time event where experienced mentors sit on one side of a table while mentees sit across from them and have a set period of time — perhaps three to five minutes — to ask the mentor questions before moving on to the next mentor. And to deal with the challenge of matching the needs of individual mentors and mentees, both WLALA (wlala.org) and the Asian Pacific American Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles (apawla.org), among others, have created “Mentoring Circles,” by which groups of mentors and mentees meet regularly in a group so mentees can get advice from a number of mentors. There is no pressure on any individual mentor or mentee to attend every session.

The Los Angeles County Bar Association’s Senior Lawyers Division (lacba.org) and its Barristers have also worked together this year to create a “Roundtable Mentoring Program.” Each session features a number of — yes — round tables, each with a judge or senior lawyer as a moderator who will introduce a different topic of interest to newer lawyers and lead the discussion. The newer lawyers can rotate among the tables depending upon their interests. From these sessions, individuals may choose to develop one-on-one mentoring relationships or simply use the senior lawyers as a resource for questions.

The Bar Association of San Francisco, always an innovator in providing useful programs, is creating a mentoring program that will include college students, law students and new attorneys as mentees, mentored by experienced attorneys. They will also offer a judicial mentorship program matching judges with minority attorneys who want to become judges. The applications are not yet on their Web site, sfbar.org, but if you are a BASF member, keep watching for this program.

Kern County has started mentoring by offering a trial skills workshop. Superior Court judges and senior lawyers trained approximately 50 younger lawyers, including civil lawyers, deputy public defenders and deputy district attorneys. Information is available at kernbar.org.

There is also the traditional mentor-mentee pairing that many bar associations perform. I have been particularly impressed by the programs offered by La Raza Lawyers of Sacramento (larazalawyers.net) and the South Asian Bar Association of Southern California (sabasc.org/events.php#event_4), which are mentoring many of their younger members.

I have only listed a few of the many outstanding mentoring programs available to California lawyers. If your bar association has a mentoring program, please send links to your membership and mentoring information on your Web site to CYLA at cyla@calbar.ca.gov. For those bar associations that do not yet provide mentoring, there are many ways to start such a program. For a great example of guidelines, see the OCBA Web site, which has applications for prospective mentors and mentees and guidelines and suggestions for a successful mentoring relationship. And the American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division has introduced an informational Web site to advance lawyer-to-lawyer mentoring called the ABA YLD Mentorship Project. The Web site, abanet.org/mentoring, offers a collection of online resources.

Mentoring new lawyers has been one of the most satisfying things I have done in my career. It is an incredibly rich experience for any attorney to mentor a young lawyer. Think of all that you have learned during your years of practice and think of what a wealth of knowledge you can impart to a young lawyer who needs your guidance. It doesn’t take much of your time, and the returns to you are immense. If every experienced lawyer in California took on just one mentee, we would all gain better qualified colleagues and a more collegial profession in this state.