Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners

What To Talk About With Your Mentee

Here are six suggestions, from columnist Gary J. Ross.

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MentorOnce we’ve been lawyers for awhile, we start having opportunities to impart our wisdom to new attorneys.  This can happen organically, like someone who works in your office that you feel a bond with; randomly, like a new attorney sitting next to you on a plane; or non-so-randomly, like in Biglaw.  In Biglaw, they assign mentors, which works about as well as using Facebook to resolve political disputes.  (My mentors always acted like they’d rather be having their tonsils taken out.)

If you are like my mentors and have trouble thinking of pearls of wisdom to impart, here are some suggestions:

We’re a profession first.  Some recent grads don’t quite realize this, since during law school they had their heads filled with all the “lawyers are heroes” stuff.  Law is a profession, just like carpentry, accounting, and pest control.  That means we do it for the money.  If the warm glow of “doing good” were enough, then doctors who are out there saving lives wouldn’t get paid much.  But they do, so there.

We can’t always do what clients want us to do.  New attorneys will often treat any request from a client like it’s a divine commandment coming down from Mount Sinai.  The judgement of how far we can go to meet client desires is one of things that is developed over time.  The client is not always right, and we can’t always give clients what they want.  You can’t write an opinion letter that says the sky is red.  (Though perhaps if the price were right I could do, “based on our observation and subject to certain assumptions, exceptions, and other matters, we have found no conclusive evidence that the sky cannot be red.”)

Master something.  Every attorney should try to master something.  Mentors can suggest some areas — arbitration provisions, company valuations, cryptocurrency — but it’s best for mentees to figure out for themselves what they’re interested in.  I’ve met people working on their PhD thesis who couldn’t care less about their topic, saying a professor they had had in college thought it’d be a good idea.  Ugh.

Bar associations.  City, state, national, practice area, there are quite a few options, no matter where you live.  Newer attorneys should dabble a bit, and then pick one and stick to it.  It doesn’t have to be the same one as the person’s mentor.

Writing/speaking. Mentors can help with this, and I’m not even referring to co-authoring or co-presenting.  Every attorney should try to write one article and have one speaking engagement per year.  Obviously some will have more, but many will have zero.  More junior attorneys don’t have full control over their time (who does?), but one article — and not just a law review article, which isn’t realistic for anyone busy, but anything that is published or made available online — a year is doable.  Same with the speaking engagements: it could be at a local library on a weekend.  Mentors can help the attorney think of topics, and should hopefully be able to facilitate communications with the journal or the venue. We all want our mentees to succeed, and if the partnership track is nine years and the candidate has nine articles and nine speaking engagements, that’s not bad.

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Long-term.  Encouraging mentees to think long-term is maybe how mentors can best help.  This isn’t tennis, where there is a limited window.  We can be lawyers our entire lives (what a thought!), so no situation or issue is going to last forever. Maybe the mentor can talk about what has led to the mentor’s current position, both good and bad. After all, the mentee may secretly (or not so secretly) hope to outshine the mentor, and perhaps avoid any missteps the mentor may have made.

And if all of that fails, maybe just talk about sports or movies for an hour or so to get the mentee’s mind off his problems.

gary-rossGary J. Ross opened his own practice, Jackson Ross PLLC, in 2013 after several years in Biglaw and the federal government. Gary handles corporate and securities matters for startups, large and small businesses, private equity funds, and investors in each, and also has a number of non-profit clients. You can reach Gary by email at Gary.Ross@JacksonRossLaw.com.

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