ABM: Always Be Mentoring
Send us your additional suggestions for mentoring in the legal academy.
So you’ve been tenured for a while, what next? In addition to publishing your next article in the LawPrawfBlog Law Review, how about paying it back or paying it forward? Today, we leave the snark largely behind and focus on mentors and mentoring.
Regardless of where you or your law school are on the career food chain, the odds are you didn’t get there without the help of good mentors who showed you the ropes and gave you a helping hand somewhere along the way. Both LawPrawfBlog and TempDean can count well over a dozen people who provided sage advice and critical help at different times when there was nothing in it for them other than being a good citizen. That makes every person who helped us both a valued mentor and a mensch. We only hope that we have thanked them profusely and not taken their help for granted.
Here are some simple suggestions for serving as an effective mentor and the care and feeding of the young in our profession. Keep in mind this is for helping others, not for imposing some pain and suffering on newbies by shoving your wisdom down their throats. If you think of other ways to help or ways you have been helped, share them with us for an eventual follow-up article on what the most effective mentors you have known have done.
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- Identify good diverse candidates who would make excellent law professors.
Not everyone has been trying to get a tenure track law teaching job since they took the ACT in high school. There are an astonishing array of talented lawyers who also have the teaching and scholarship chops to be effective law professors without having attended the usual five law schools or clerked on the Supreme Court. Identify and cultivate good junior diverse candidates who may excel at a branch of the profession they may not have even considered.
- Explain “the game” to those considering teaching.
The pathways to legal academia are opaque, to say the least. If you haven’t been prepping your whole life and sucking up to your professors from day one in law school, the game may not be obvious. In general, law schools want folks who are good scholars, good teachers, and not such miserable people that working with them is a daily living hell. So don’t actively recruit horrible jerks and guide the good folks toward assembling a record that will be attractive to law schools hiring.
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Explain how to prove your mentee will be a good scholar. They shouldn’t make hiring committees guess that they will eventually duplicate the success of their student note from X years ago. They need to write something serious, even if short. Of course, preferably more than just one, but that is dependent on time. Take the time to help the candidate develop a scholarly agenda. Many schools understand that people in practice are working 3000 hours a year and have a family and lack the time and resources to do a comprehensive history of secured lending since the Neolitihic Age as would a tenured professor with a summer research grant and two research assistants.
Show the mentee how to show they will be a good teacher. Explain the adjunct process and VAP type program. Hint: most young lawyers are clueless about the VAP options and can use your help to understand whether or not it would make sense for them.
Explain the AALS process, help them fill out a FAR, and most importantly, explain how and when to reach to law schools directly. You shouldn’t be surprised that great practicing lawyers have no idea what pleasures of the meat market are in store without someone to guide them through it, more than once if necessary.
- Pick up the phone and recommend those who have impressed you.
Don’t just be a name on a FAR form. Work the emails and the phones for those candidates you truly believe are the best thing since sliced bread (btw, turns out sliced bread was invented far more recently than you would have guessed). Remember, everybody else’s mentors are already doing this for their BFFs.
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- Moot a job candidate’s talk before they hit AALS or the callback circuit.
Practice makes perfect. Make sure they know this is not a work in progress talk or an opportunity to get feedback on a half-baked idea. This is Shark Tank. Make sure their talk sparkles, doesn’t run over, that they know what questions the Sharks will likely ask, and how to respond with knowledge, humility, and praise for the work of the person asking the question.
- Read draft manuscripts (lots of them, and more than one draft).
Read and provide substantial feedback on manuscripts written by your mentees, your junior colleagues, or junior colleagues at other schools. Help them understand the publication cycles, how submissions work, the mechanics and ethics of expediting, and why taking the first offer from the Pawtucket State Journal of Mineralogy and Legal History may not be in their best long-term interests.
- Advocate for inclusion of junior and diverse speakers at the programs, conferences, symposia, and organizations where you participate.
LawProfBlawg’s head explodes when he sees yet another ABA or AALS program with the same people he saw on that program every year since the first Bush administration. TempDean refuses to go to programs when he can predict who will say the same things to the same people as last year. Make a list for your professional New Year’s Resolution of 10 junior and diverse scholars in your field and then recommend them to others and include them on your own programs and organizations. Want to win mentor brownie points? Decline an invitation to do something in favor of someone on your list or only accept if that other person on the list can be included. Then make a new list in a couple of years and rinse and repeat.
- Actually step aside from something to make room for junior and diverse colleagues.
TempDean is forever grateful for the full-time faculty member who stepped aside from teaching a particular seminar in his field of expertise so TempDean could get his feet wet as a first-time adjunct. TempDean wasn’t half as good as his mentor, but got better as a result. There are dozens of things that you have done forever at your school that can be done by others who will learn and grow as a result. Maybe it’s time not to chair appointments for the 30th year in a row, continue on that prestigious committee position at a bar association, or that advisory board that you actually forgot you were on.
- Nominate junior and diverse colleagues for honors, memberships, and leadership positions.
Time for you to serve on a nominating committee or step off a board? Pull out that list or phone a friend and recommend someone who has impressed you. Don’t wait to be asked. Maybe the person doesn’t actually want you to nominate them for the ALI, the ABA, or the local bar committee, but they sure will be flattered that you thought enough of them to ask. If they turn you down, make sure they understand how these opportunities will help them achieve their goals in the teaching and broader legal world.
- Fight prejudice where and when you see it.
LawProfBlawg and TempDean think all schools can do better. Implicit bias often plays a role in determining career success even when overt discrimination doesn’t appear to be an issue. Fight for those outside the mainstream when you think they are not being treated fairly. Help them achieve the seat at the table so they can also fight for themselves.
- Cede actual power (if you have any).
See, don’t you already feel better? Send us your additional suggestions for mentoring in the legal academy and we’ll collect the best of the best for a future column.
For the meantime, ABM.
TempDean is an anonymous professor and current or former interim administrator at a top-100 law school. Email him care of lawprofblawg@gmail.com if you must.
LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top-100 law school. You can see more of his musings here. He is way funnier on social media, he claims. Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.
