December Issue

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Making the Most of Mentoring

by Charles Volkert, Esq.

Charles A. Volkert is executive director of Robert Half Legal®, a legal staffing service specializing in the placement of attorneys, paralegals, legal administrators and other legal professionals with law firms and corporate legal departments. Based in Menlo Park, Calif., Robert Half Legal has offices in major cities throughout the United States and Canada.

A mentoring program can benefit your law office on a variety of levels, especially as a developmental tool that can considerably boost recruitment and retention efforts. According to a survey commissioned by our company, 83 percent of attorneys polled said providing opportunities for career development is the most effective incentive for retaining and motivating the best workers. As a legal administrator, you are in an ideal position to spearhead a new mentoring program or enhance an existing one for your firm or legal department.

Mentoring impacts recruitment because legal job candidates are attracted by a firm’s reputation for fostering talent. Mentoring also improves retention. Existing employees view a mentoring experience as professionally enriching, and mentors themselves enjoy an increased level of professional pride and satisfaction as they have a direct impact on the development of their coworkers. Firms that have embraced mentoring are rewarded with a stable, highly functioning legal team composed of the most highly skilled attorneys, paralegals, legal secretaries and other support staff. Because committed employees are more loyal, these organizations typically enjoy higher morale and lower turnover rates. And low turnover will ultimately enhance a firm’s profitability and competitive advantage.

A mentoring program can also help law offices achieve diversity in staffing. Mentoring relationships provide access to the kind of professional connections and leadership development opportunities that are most attractive to women and minorities. After sufficient tenure, these employees will ultimately become mentors themselves and attract a new generation of culturally diverse candidates.

Does your firm’s mentoring program deliver all these benefits? Perhaps mentoring has been used mainly to orient and train new hires. Or maybe your firm does not yet have a formal mentoring program in place. Whether you are fine-tuning an existing program or creating a new one from scratch, the following tips will help you develop an effective, successful plan.

• Create the Framework

Successful mentoring doesn’t happen without effective planning. There are a number of threshold issues to consider before launching a program.

Make sure management is on board. A formal mentoring program is unlikely to function well without commitment on the part of the firm or law department’s management. Make sure all senior staff members, from the partners or general counsel on down, understand and support the program. If it will be necessary for mentors to spend a portion of their schedules on training or related activities, be sure to get advance approval.

Determine the scope. Do you want your program to focus exclusively on legal support staff or also include associates and newly hired attorneys? Some law offices have initiatives in place to match junior attorneys with more senior attorneys. There are others that choose to connect new lawyers with leaders from outside the department to give them a deeper understanding of the business.

Set guidelines and goals. Determine the purpose of the mentoring program and its duration. For example, you may want to use it for a limited period of time to transmit the firm’s institutional knowledge and best practices. On the other hand, if your objective is to have the mentors act as ongoing career advisors and role models then a long-term, open-ended approach is better. Whatever the case, make sure your firm’s mentors have a clear understanding of their responsibilities. You may want to conduct an “orientation” session for mentors to discuss the best ways to impart knowledge and information to their mentees.

Identify and select mentors. Depending on the size of your firm, the number of staff members to be mentored and the nature of your business, you may wish to create a team of mentors who represent specific areas of expertise, such as patent law, intellectual property, litigation and so forth. The mentors should also have advanced communication and technical skills; tenure with the company; enthusiasm; leadership ability and the desire to be involved in staff development.

• Launching the Program

Once you have established the preliminary framework, begin matching mentors with mentees. If your law office is large enough, you may want to employ a team approach, assigning less experienced employees to senior staff on a rotating basis. For example, a newly hired junior paralegal might first spend a week or two with a senior paralegal, learning about pending matters. The next mentor may have technical expertise and train the junior paralegal on the firm’s computer system. A third mentor might act as a professional development counselor who listens to the paralegal’s career ambitions and provides advice and direction on an ongoing basis.

In addition to this traditional approach to mentoring, also consider other approaches to the process:

E-mentoring. Distance between mentor and mentee is no longer a barrier to creating a productive relationship. Today, a mentoring pair can maintain contact via the Internet, e-mail, text messaging on PDAs or even videoconferencing. Ongoing e-mentoring can help strengthen ties among staff members in geographically dispersed offices, which will facilitate work flow and communication on cases and projects

Reverse mentoring. Mentors also stand to learn from their mentees. A tech-savvy paralegal or associate, for example, may be able to share knowledge with a more tenured mentor. A professional experienced with creating blogs, for instance, can demonstrate how this technology can raise the firm’s online visibility.

Assigned vs. self-selected. The formal approach assigns mentors to mentees based on the goals the firm has for such relationships. Alternatively, participants can choose one another and set their own goals. The firm is still involved to the extent that it provides a structure that facilitates the mentoring relationship (for example, making sure the parties have ample opportunities to interact).

Once relationships are established, encourage mentoring pairs to communicate frequently with one another about their expectations and goals. At regular intervals, ask the participants for feedback about the program. Meet with both mentors and mentees to discuss their experiences and ask for their suggestions for improving the program.

The goal is to ensure that a “mentoring mindset” becomes part of the firm’s culture. At this point, you will know that your firm’s mentoring program is well established as a catalyst for individual professional growth.

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