Thursday, August 26, 2010
Spotlight: Georgia's Transition Into Law Practice Program
Ed. Note: The following is the edited text of remarks made by Douglas Ashworth, Director of the Georgia Transition Into Law Practice Program of the State Bar of Georgia at last April's National Conference on Mentoring in the Legal Profession held at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Mr. Ashworth was an active participant in the Summit, and Recommendation 4 suggests universal mentoring requirements for new admittees. CCB
Remarks to the
National Conference on Mentoring in Legal Profession
By Douglas Ashworth, Esq.
Director, Transition Into Law Practice Program
State Bar of Georgia
Friday, April 9, 2010
Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough
CENTER ON PROFESSIONALISM
University of South Carolina School of Law
Columbia, South Carolina
I have been asked to share with you some aspects of our Mentoring Program - a Program now rolling along into its 5th year of existence, with over 4,600 Beginning Lawyers having been mentored by over 2,600 Mentors.
I have been asked to address 3 questions:
- How do you recruit Mentors?
- How do you train Mentors?
- What works well and doesn't work well in your Program?
I. How Do You Recruit Mentors?
Five years ago, as our launch date approached, our number one concern was whether we would have enough Mentors. We projected that 1,000 Beginning Lawyers would be going through our program and we sweated over whether we could find enough Mentors to pair them with. That was then.
Now, five years later, I am happy to say that we have never had any trouble recruiting Mentors....In...answering why we have been successful in recruiting Mentors, I will start with 4...external factors which, although completely independent of the planning and implementation of our Mentoring program, have nevertheless made a culture of mentoring possible.
4 Mentor Recruitment Factors Not Within Our Control
1. Georgia is a mandatory bar and has mandatory CLE. Our mentoring is the mandatory CLE event for our new lawyers. Georgia's history of mandatory CLE is long enough to have "institutionalized" the concept of "having to do something".
I have learned that being a mandatory bar with an established history of mandatory CLE sure makes a difference when you are trying to work a "sea change" in how things are done.
2. Believe me, this is a big one - our judges and our lawyers are on the same page. They like each other. They don't have turf battles. On big issues, our Bench and Bar have a long history of presenting a unified front to the media, to the legislators, and to the public. Again, this factor is not directly related to mentoring, but it makes a huge difference when a new program is being rolled out.
3. All of our law schools are on the same page. Each of the 5 law schools is represented on our Committee. The law professors who teach professionalism courses were integral in developing the CLE programs which accompany our Mentoring program. Just as with the Bench and Bar relationship, our law schools have a long track record of working together on big issues, even though they may otherwise compete for students and resources.
4. Georgia's Professionalism movement. The existence and proactive nature of our Chief Justice's Commission on Professionalism helped set the stage for an innovative program like mentoring. Mentoring is professionalism in action, and Georgia's Bar Members have been provided with numerous professionalism enhancement opportunities since 1989.
I can't emphasize this point enough - we are, in the end totally dependent upon the professionalism of our Mentors, who are volunteers. If they are professional, then our mentoring program shines. If they are unprofessional, then our mentoring program would stink.
These 4 factors: Mandatory Bar & CLE; Harmony among Bench and Bar; Harmony among all law schools; and our tradition of a Professionalism movement, certainly provided a rich environment in which to sow the seeds of a mentoring program. No matter how thorough our implementation plan, our attempts at recruiting Mentors would assuredly have suffered if any one of these 4 factors were not present in Georgia.
6 Mentor Recruitment Factors Within Our Control
Now, here are 6 factors within our control that have helped us recruit Mentors.
1. Broad Based Support. The committee which developed, implemented and continues to evaluate and to tweak our program is all inclusive. Every constituency in our State Bar has a voice at the table. Our Supreme Court, our State Bar Officers and our Board of Governors were regularly consulted and updated.
I need to pause and re-emphasize this crucial factor behind our success.
Suppose, for a moment, that you are a judge, or prosecutor, or public defender, or big firm lawyer, or small town solo practitioner, and/or a member of a minority bar association. Suppose it's prior to the effective date of our program, you hear a presentation about our program and you have concerns about anything mandatory coming down from Bar headquarters. Suppose you voice your concern to friends or colleagues in your practice area niche.
If you follow up, you will eventually be talking to someone who represents your practice setting who is, in fact, sitting at the Committee table making policy decisions about the proposed program.
This sequence of events is so important, because there's an excellent chance your concerns will be addressed (that's one reason our incubation period was 10 years). But even if your specific concerns are not resolved, you will have to admit that your constituency had a voice, and that this new mandatory program was not, in fact, something that was dreamed up in Atlanta and then crammed down the throat of everybody else in Georgia.
This factor was crucial because as we began Mentor recruitment efforts, there was unity across all sections of the Bar - no one constituency of our Bar could claim that other portions of the Bar were "forcing something on them".
2. Recruitment By Advance Publicity. Our program was well publicized in advance of implementation. Committee members were dispatched all over Georgia, and with a "stump speech" and a uniform handout to stay on point. Our program was the featured cover story of our Georgia Bar Journal - 6 months prior to actual implementation. Mentor Volunteer forms were distributed at every single event, and thankfully, the response was immediate.
3. Flexibility in Mentoring Plans. Although our Committee prepared a Model Mentoring Plan which is widely used, we allow and encourage each Mentor and Beginning Lawyer to fashion a written plan which is individualized to each practice setting. The only proviso is that the written plan, which is reviewed by me personally, contains the minimum criteria which include discussions about ethics, professionalism, client relations, etc. This is 180 degrees from the "one size fits all" Bridge the Gap model for new lawyer training. We believe that overall Mentor recruitment and retention is enhanced by allowing each Mentor the ability to become invested in an individualized mentoring plan for their Beginning Lawyer.
4. Design For Self-Recruitment of Most Mentors. Our program is designed to make Mentor recruitment easier. How? Through our development of different categories of mentoring, specifically the category of Inside Mentoring.
We use 3 kinds of Mentoring - Inside, Outside and Group. Here are some quick percentages: 80% Inside Mentoring; 13% Group Mentoring; and 7% Outside Mentoring. I'll come back to Outside Mentoring in a moment, and I'll cover Group Mentoring when I talk about what works well and what doesn't work well.
Inside Mentoring means they are mentored by someone within their firm or organization. It is the business of their supervisor who their Inside Mentor will be. This also means that if you hire a Beginning Lawyer, someone in your organization is required to Mentor them.
80% of our Beginning Lawyers are in Inside Mentoring. Because the selection of the Inside Mentor is the business of the Beginning Lawyer's supervisor - as long as they meet our minimum qualifications - 80% - or 800 of our Mentors each year are "self-selected".
Thus, as the Program Director, I do not have to directly recruit Mentor Volunteers for approximately 80% of our Beginning Lawyers each year. I have to verify that each one of the Mentors meets our minimum qualifications, but I don't have to find them. Obviously, the way in which we created Inside Mentoring accounts for one reason why we do not lack for Mentor volunteers.
7% or 70 Beginning Lawyers will be in Outside Mentoring, which brings me to my next factor...
5. Design To Avoid Mentor Burnout. Specifically, avoiding burnout of the Mentors who volunteer to do the most selfless act of all, help a budding sole practitioner. Again, 7% or about 70 of our Beginning Lawyers each year are crazy enough to do what I did - hang out a shingle right away. It is my responsibility to pair them one-on-one with an Outside Mentor.
We have recruited Outside Mentors well because we have avoided burning them out. How? By screening Beginning Lawyers to make sure they are serious about flying solo.
I learned very quickly that a lot of the Beginning Lawyers who wrote "solo practice" on their enrollment forms were in actuality confusing their inability to find a job with a firm or organization with their ability to be self-employed.
I will repeat that, because it causes the most labor intensive part of my job as Program Director. Here it is again: A significant number of Beginning Lawyers who report that they want to be solo practitioners don't really want to be solo practitioners. Instead, they are confusing their inability to find a job with their ability to be self-employed.
I don't have time in this segment to go into details, but because I started my own firm from scratch, I know how to screen out those who are serious about flying solo from those who are not.
This is important, because our Outside Mentors who are willing to invest time and effort in helping budding solo practitioners will very quickly burn out if I don't effectively screen out those Beginning Lawyers who are not really serious about flying solo.
6. Lessons From Our Pilot Project. We learned a lot about what to do, and what not to do, from our Pilot Project. All of the reports from our 2-year Pilot Project are on our website, but for purposes of these remarks, here are the big lessons we learned from our Mentors in our Pilot Project:
(1) We Mentors truly believe that mentoring works;
(2) We believe mandatory mentoring is a good idea, if you do it right;
(3) If you want to do it wrong, then over-regulate us.
So that's my response to Question 1 - how we recruit Mentors in Georgia.
4 factors which we didn't create, but happily, they provided us with a professional environment conducive to building a culture of mentoring: (1) Mandatory Bar & CLE; (2) Harmony among Bench and Bar; (3) Harmony among law schools; and (4) Professionalism movement.
And 6 factors which we did create are: (1) Broad Support; (2) Recruitment By Advance Publicity; (3) Flexibility in Mentoring Plans; (4) Good Design of Inside Mentoring; (5) Good Design of Outside Mentoring; and (6) Heeding the lessons from our Pilot Project.
II. How Do You Train Mentors?
Heeding the lessons of our Pilot Project leads me to answer Question 2 - How Do We Train Mentors In Georgia? The short answer is with a carrot and not with a stick.
Remember the lesson our Mentor volunteers taught us in our Pilot Project - you want to do this wrong, then over regulate us. To put this concept in a positive statement, you have to trust us.
We offer Mentor training, but we do not require it. We offer a carrot - free CLE hours if you attend our Mentor Orientation Program, but we don't require that you attend.
Now, I've done this long enough, and I know enough of you in this auditorium well enough, to know that opinions will differ on this issue. How, you ask, can you require mandatory mentoring of newly admitted attorneys and yet not require mandatory training of the Mentors? I know, I know.
The answer is simple - we don't require training of our Mentors because we can't require it - our program would not have been given the broad based support that it has if we had told our Mentor volunteers, in effect, that they were not competent to train lawyers that they hired unless and until they went through some training which we conjured up.
I will paraphrase Benjamin Franklin's observation of the Constitutional Convention, when you gather together a lot of people from different backgrounds into one room and try to get something constructive done, you do get the benefit of their collective intelligence and experience, but you also get the full force of their differences of opinions as well.
If we had tried to mandate training in order to serve as a Mentor, our program would have never been approved or implemented. The clear message from our volunteers was "you have to trust us". We heeded the message because we had to. Call it reality, or a political deal, or whatever you wish, but there it is.
So, we offer a 3 hour CLE which is free for our Mentors, and I am pleased that hundreds of our Mentors avail themselves of it every year.
III. What Works And What Doesn't Work?
I have organized my response to this question based upon our 3 types of Mentoring.
Group Mentoring: Well, if you are by nature suspicious of any report that sounds too good, and you are looking for a soft underbelly of our mentoring program, it's called "Group Mentoring". I'll be frank, Group Mentoring is like a baby which was suddenly dropped off on the doorstep of our Bar headquarters, unexpected, unruly, but a reality which had to be embraced and "raised" nonetheless.
To start with, we never foresaw that we would need Group Mentoring. Our Implementation Plan is extensive, but it was built on the following assumptions: (1) You will be employed, thus Inside Mentoring; or, (2) You will go solo, thus Outside Mentoring; or, (3) If neither employed nor Solo, you will take Inactive Status, thus exempt because you are not practicing law.
Imagine our surprise then, in the very first month of implementation, when we were faced with dozens of newly admitted lawyers who were not employed, not desirous of flying solo, refusing to go Inactive - thus they were all too eligible to practice. "Where is our Mentor?" they asked of me. When I replied "what do you want to practice?" they replied "We don't know yet - where's our Mentor?"
I would love to sit here and tell you that we have found the perfect answer. I would love to say that we have created the perfect growing and nurturing environment for that unexpected infant left on our doorstep. But our program, like all creations of mortal women and men, falls short of the glory of perfection. We're doing the best we can, and we call it Group Mentoring.
Group Mentoring takes these folks - who represent 13% of the total - about 130 per year, through our model mentoring plan in group sessions, with some smaller group breakouts. Group Mentoring events exposes them to a broad diversity of background and experience - 60% of the faculty is female and 40% represents ethnic minorities. It also provides them with a broad presentation of practice areas, but I will not pretend that it is any match for a one-on-one mentoring relationship.
When I attempted to interest Mentor volunteers to enter into one-on-one relationships with them, I was met with a very valid reply - past certain preliminaries, what do I have to offer a Beginning Lawyer who isn't even sure they even want to practice in my area of specialty?
Facilitating the Group Mentoring events is a very labor intensive and unforeseen, responsibility of my job. I would like to do more - and better - but we are a 2 person department, so we do the best we have with what we have.
We've had to tweak it time and again. We will keep trying. And, at events like this, I will keep right on asking folks like you if you have found a solution that does not fall short of the glory of perfection.
I need to move on to the next point, but I can say that the advent of Group Mentoring has revealed a related and much more fundamental reality - no mentoring program, no matter how well designed or successful, will constitute the magical cure for someone who doesn't have any idea what to do with their new law license in particular, or in some cases, their life in general.
Put another way, perhaps one side effect of our mandatory mentoring program is that it forces a newly admitted lawyer to "have a plan". It is harder for a Beginning Lawyer in Georgia to lead an unexamined life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing. Well, enough of Group Mentoring.
Inside Mentoring: First, recall that Inside Mentoring accounts for 80% of our total. We believe that it works very well. It allows Beginning Lawyers to complete their initial CLE requirements in a way that compliments their actual practice setting, instead of having to sit through a one-time "one size fits all" Bridge the Gap type program.
Our insistence on a mentoring plan which includes a professionalism emphasis means that the Beginning Lawyer's has an ongoing discussion about professionalism issues with a Mentor from the start.
Inside Mentoring is relatively easy for us to monitor. Now, these are the things that work well about Inside Mentoring.
Here's what may not work well about Inside Mentoring - we simply do not have any control over whether or not a Beginning Lawyer goes to work for a jerk.
If the Inside Mentor says "just sign my name to it and send it in" and generally treats them in a non-professional manner, there's not much we can do about it frankly. Our Committee debated long and hard about how to possibly prevent this problem area. In the end, we did implement minimum requirements for Mentors, but past that, we all realized that we had to accept this risk.
Now, I have learned that this set-up may fly in the face of studies detailing how mentoring relationships may actually form and develop, but I have also learned this reality - any attempt to dictate to Georgia lawyers who could or could not mentor their new employees in their law firms would fail - and our program would have never been approved.
Some firms assign Inside Mentors one-on-one, some don't. Some firms assign Inside Mentors who are direct supervisors, some don't. We gave up control of those decisions because we had to do so in order to gain broad based support for a mandatory mentoring program.
I have fielded some calls from Beginning Lawyers who reported, in essence, that they were working for real jerks. But thankfully, those calls have been a rare handful out of 4,600 Beginning Lawyers over 5 years.
Outside Mentoring. First, the bad news, then the good news. Here's what does not work well about our Outside Mentoring - lack of Mentor volunteers in certain practice areas.
Try as I might, I have never had any volunteers in the following areas: real estate; sports and entertainment; and estate planning. Having been in solo practice myself, I think I know why. It's probably unrealistic to expect that you can open a solo practice in these areas - especially in metro-Atlanta, unless you have some kind of unique relationship or tie-in. Real estate, to the extent it exists right now, is big volume done by big boutiques that are proprietary if not predatory about their client base. The other two areas are narrow niches. Trying to explain to Beginning Lawyers why practice areas they are interested in are not feasible in the marketplace of their choosing is labor intensive.
Here's the good news. Other than that, Outside Mentoring works really great! It is great for the budding solo practitioner, it is great for the profession, and it is great for the public. We have many, many success stories by now. I am glad to say that hardly one week goes by without one of our solo practitioners dropping off a thank you note, or dropping by in person to report on how they learned how to run a business and also how to practice law - both at the same time thanks to their Outside Mentor.
More so than any other area of our program, our Outside Mentors are the ones who regularly report that their own professional lives have been re-energized and revitalized by helping a Beginning Lawyer start their own practice the right way.
So, overall, our mandatory mentoring program continues to succeed wonderfully. I am pleased, but I am not proud.
We are always happy to help others learn from our successes and our failures. I am flattered, but I am not infallible.
It took a long time to build the consensus we needed. Those experiences have taught me that there are both peaks and valleys in any program that is a "sea change". My confidence in our program is tempered with a healthy dose of caution. I am ever on the lookout to diligently tweak what needs to be tweaked. I believe our program is on a good path, but I will never claim that we have arrived.
David Brinkley put it this way, upon winning his first Emmy - and this fits my feeling perfectly: "Success is fun, if you realize it's temporary and you don't inhale." So, in Georgia, we are having some fun, but we have not inhaled.
At all times, we are ultimately in the hands of the continued professionalism of Georgia's experienced lawyers who are willing to serve as Mentors. We have set a good table, but they serve up the food - good or bad.
I'll close with my favorite evaluation comments that we have received - from a Beginning Lawyer: "You have given me a safe place to ask a stupid question"; and from a Mentor: "You have restored my faith in our profession."
- 30 -
Remarks to the
National Conference on Mentoring in Legal Profession
By Douglas Ashworth, Esq.
Director, Transition Into Law Practice Program
State Bar of Georgia
Friday, April 9, 2010
Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough
CENTER ON PROFESSIONALISM
University of South Carolina School of Law
Columbia, South Carolina
I have been asked to share with you some aspects of our Mentoring Program - a Program now rolling along into its 5th year of existence, with over 4,600 Beginning Lawyers having been mentored by over 2,600 Mentors.
I have been asked to address 3 questions:
- How do you recruit Mentors?
- How do you train Mentors?
- What works well and doesn't work well in your Program?
I. How Do You Recruit Mentors?
Five years ago, as our launch date approached, our number one concern was whether we would have enough Mentors. We projected that 1,000 Beginning Lawyers would be going through our program and we sweated over whether we could find enough Mentors to pair them with. That was then.
Now, five years later, I am happy to say that we have never had any trouble recruiting Mentors....In...answering why we have been successful in recruiting Mentors, I will start with 4...external factors which, although completely independent of the planning and implementation of our Mentoring program, have nevertheless made a culture of mentoring possible.
4 Mentor Recruitment Factors Not Within Our Control
1. Georgia is a mandatory bar and has mandatory CLE. Our mentoring is the mandatory CLE event for our new lawyers. Georgia's history of mandatory CLE is long enough to have "institutionalized" the concept of "having to do something".
I have learned that being a mandatory bar with an established history of mandatory CLE sure makes a difference when you are trying to work a "sea change" in how things are done.
2. Believe me, this is a big one - our judges and our lawyers are on the same page. They like each other. They don't have turf battles. On big issues, our Bench and Bar have a long history of presenting a unified front to the media, to the legislators, and to the public. Again, this factor is not directly related to mentoring, but it makes a huge difference when a new program is being rolled out.
3. All of our law schools are on the same page. Each of the 5 law schools is represented on our Committee. The law professors who teach professionalism courses were integral in developing the CLE programs which accompany our Mentoring program. Just as with the Bench and Bar relationship, our law schools have a long track record of working together on big issues, even though they may otherwise compete for students and resources.
4. Georgia's Professionalism movement. The existence and proactive nature of our Chief Justice's Commission on Professionalism helped set the stage for an innovative program like mentoring. Mentoring is professionalism in action, and Georgia's Bar Members have been provided with numerous professionalism enhancement opportunities since 1989.
I can't emphasize this point enough - we are, in the end totally dependent upon the professionalism of our Mentors, who are volunteers. If they are professional, then our mentoring program shines. If they are unprofessional, then our mentoring program would stink.
These 4 factors: Mandatory Bar & CLE; Harmony among Bench and Bar; Harmony among all law schools; and our tradition of a Professionalism movement, certainly provided a rich environment in which to sow the seeds of a mentoring program. No matter how thorough our implementation plan, our attempts at recruiting Mentors would assuredly have suffered if any one of these 4 factors were not present in Georgia.
6 Mentor Recruitment Factors Within Our Control
Now, here are 6 factors within our control that have helped us recruit Mentors.
1. Broad Based Support. The committee which developed, implemented and continues to evaluate and to tweak our program is all inclusive. Every constituency in our State Bar has a voice at the table. Our Supreme Court, our State Bar Officers and our Board of Governors were regularly consulted and updated.
I need to pause and re-emphasize this crucial factor behind our success.
Suppose, for a moment, that you are a judge, or prosecutor, or public defender, or big firm lawyer, or small town solo practitioner, and/or a member of a minority bar association. Suppose it's prior to the effective date of our program, you hear a presentation about our program and you have concerns about anything mandatory coming down from Bar headquarters. Suppose you voice your concern to friends or colleagues in your practice area niche.
If you follow up, you will eventually be talking to someone who represents your practice setting who is, in fact, sitting at the Committee table making policy decisions about the proposed program.
This sequence of events is so important, because there's an excellent chance your concerns will be addressed (that's one reason our incubation period was 10 years). But even if your specific concerns are not resolved, you will have to admit that your constituency had a voice, and that this new mandatory program was not, in fact, something that was dreamed up in Atlanta and then crammed down the throat of everybody else in Georgia.
This factor was crucial because as we began Mentor recruitment efforts, there was unity across all sections of the Bar - no one constituency of our Bar could claim that other portions of the Bar were "forcing something on them".
2. Recruitment By Advance Publicity. Our program was well publicized in advance of implementation. Committee members were dispatched all over Georgia, and with a "stump speech" and a uniform handout to stay on point. Our program was the featured cover story of our Georgia Bar Journal - 6 months prior to actual implementation. Mentor Volunteer forms were distributed at every single event, and thankfully, the response was immediate.
3. Flexibility in Mentoring Plans. Although our Committee prepared a Model Mentoring Plan which is widely used, we allow and encourage each Mentor and Beginning Lawyer to fashion a written plan which is individualized to each practice setting. The only proviso is that the written plan, which is reviewed by me personally, contains the minimum criteria which include discussions about ethics, professionalism, client relations, etc. This is 180 degrees from the "one size fits all" Bridge the Gap model for new lawyer training. We believe that overall Mentor recruitment and retention is enhanced by allowing each Mentor the ability to become invested in an individualized mentoring plan for their Beginning Lawyer.
4. Design For Self-Recruitment of Most Mentors. Our program is designed to make Mentor recruitment easier. How? Through our development of different categories of mentoring, specifically the category of Inside Mentoring.
We use 3 kinds of Mentoring - Inside, Outside and Group. Here are some quick percentages: 80% Inside Mentoring; 13% Group Mentoring; and 7% Outside Mentoring. I'll come back to Outside Mentoring in a moment, and I'll cover Group Mentoring when I talk about what works well and what doesn't work well.
Inside Mentoring means they are mentored by someone within their firm or organization. It is the business of their supervisor who their Inside Mentor will be. This also means that if you hire a Beginning Lawyer, someone in your organization is required to Mentor them.
80% of our Beginning Lawyers are in Inside Mentoring. Because the selection of the Inside Mentor is the business of the Beginning Lawyer's supervisor - as long as they meet our minimum qualifications - 80% - or 800 of our Mentors each year are "self-selected".
Thus, as the Program Director, I do not have to directly recruit Mentor Volunteers for approximately 80% of our Beginning Lawyers each year. I have to verify that each one of the Mentors meets our minimum qualifications, but I don't have to find them. Obviously, the way in which we created Inside Mentoring accounts for one reason why we do not lack for Mentor volunteers.
7% or 70 Beginning Lawyers will be in Outside Mentoring, which brings me to my next factor...
5. Design To Avoid Mentor Burnout. Specifically, avoiding burnout of the Mentors who volunteer to do the most selfless act of all, help a budding sole practitioner. Again, 7% or about 70 of our Beginning Lawyers each year are crazy enough to do what I did - hang out a shingle right away. It is my responsibility to pair them one-on-one with an Outside Mentor.
We have recruited Outside Mentors well because we have avoided burning them out. How? By screening Beginning Lawyers to make sure they are serious about flying solo.
I learned very quickly that a lot of the Beginning Lawyers who wrote "solo practice" on their enrollment forms were in actuality confusing their inability to find a job with a firm or organization with their ability to be self-employed.
I will repeat that, because it causes the most labor intensive part of my job as Program Director. Here it is again: A significant number of Beginning Lawyers who report that they want to be solo practitioners don't really want to be solo practitioners. Instead, they are confusing their inability to find a job with their ability to be self-employed.
I don't have time in this segment to go into details, but because I started my own firm from scratch, I know how to screen out those who are serious about flying solo from those who are not.
This is important, because our Outside Mentors who are willing to invest time and effort in helping budding solo practitioners will very quickly burn out if I don't effectively screen out those Beginning Lawyers who are not really serious about flying solo.
6. Lessons From Our Pilot Project. We learned a lot about what to do, and what not to do, from our Pilot Project. All of the reports from our 2-year Pilot Project are on our website, but for purposes of these remarks, here are the big lessons we learned from our Mentors in our Pilot Project:
(1) We Mentors truly believe that mentoring works;
(2) We believe mandatory mentoring is a good idea, if you do it right;
(3) If you want to do it wrong, then over-regulate us.
So that's my response to Question 1 - how we recruit Mentors in Georgia.
4 factors which we didn't create, but happily, they provided us with a professional environment conducive to building a culture of mentoring: (1) Mandatory Bar & CLE; (2) Harmony among Bench and Bar; (3) Harmony among law schools; and (4) Professionalism movement.
And 6 factors which we did create are: (1) Broad Support; (2) Recruitment By Advance Publicity; (3) Flexibility in Mentoring Plans; (4) Good Design of Inside Mentoring; (5) Good Design of Outside Mentoring; and (6) Heeding the lessons from our Pilot Project.
II. How Do You Train Mentors?
Heeding the lessons of our Pilot Project leads me to answer Question 2 - How Do We Train Mentors In Georgia? The short answer is with a carrot and not with a stick.
Remember the lesson our Mentor volunteers taught us in our Pilot Project - you want to do this wrong, then over regulate us. To put this concept in a positive statement, you have to trust us.
We offer Mentor training, but we do not require it. We offer a carrot - free CLE hours if you attend our Mentor Orientation Program, but we don't require that you attend.
Now, I've done this long enough, and I know enough of you in this auditorium well enough, to know that opinions will differ on this issue. How, you ask, can you require mandatory mentoring of newly admitted attorneys and yet not require mandatory training of the Mentors? I know, I know.
The answer is simple - we don't require training of our Mentors because we can't require it - our program would not have been given the broad based support that it has if we had told our Mentor volunteers, in effect, that they were not competent to train lawyers that they hired unless and until they went through some training which we conjured up.
I will paraphrase Benjamin Franklin's observation of the Constitutional Convention, when you gather together a lot of people from different backgrounds into one room and try to get something constructive done, you do get the benefit of their collective intelligence and experience, but you also get the full force of their differences of opinions as well.
If we had tried to mandate training in order to serve as a Mentor, our program would have never been approved or implemented. The clear message from our volunteers was "you have to trust us". We heeded the message because we had to. Call it reality, or a political deal, or whatever you wish, but there it is.
So, we offer a 3 hour CLE which is free for our Mentors, and I am pleased that hundreds of our Mentors avail themselves of it every year.
III. What Works And What Doesn't Work?
I have organized my response to this question based upon our 3 types of Mentoring.
Group Mentoring: Well, if you are by nature suspicious of any report that sounds too good, and you are looking for a soft underbelly of our mentoring program, it's called "Group Mentoring". I'll be frank, Group Mentoring is like a baby which was suddenly dropped off on the doorstep of our Bar headquarters, unexpected, unruly, but a reality which had to be embraced and "raised" nonetheless.
To start with, we never foresaw that we would need Group Mentoring. Our Implementation Plan is extensive, but it was built on the following assumptions: (1) You will be employed, thus Inside Mentoring; or, (2) You will go solo, thus Outside Mentoring; or, (3) If neither employed nor Solo, you will take Inactive Status, thus exempt because you are not practicing law.
Imagine our surprise then, in the very first month of implementation, when we were faced with dozens of newly admitted lawyers who were not employed, not desirous of flying solo, refusing to go Inactive - thus they were all too eligible to practice. "Where is our Mentor?" they asked of me. When I replied "what do you want to practice?" they replied "We don't know yet - where's our Mentor?"
I would love to sit here and tell you that we have found the perfect answer. I would love to say that we have created the perfect growing and nurturing environment for that unexpected infant left on our doorstep. But our program, like all creations of mortal women and men, falls short of the glory of perfection. We're doing the best we can, and we call it Group Mentoring.
Group Mentoring takes these folks - who represent 13% of the total - about 130 per year, through our model mentoring plan in group sessions, with some smaller group breakouts. Group Mentoring events exposes them to a broad diversity of background and experience - 60% of the faculty is female and 40% represents ethnic minorities. It also provides them with a broad presentation of practice areas, but I will not pretend that it is any match for a one-on-one mentoring relationship.
When I attempted to interest Mentor volunteers to enter into one-on-one relationships with them, I was met with a very valid reply - past certain preliminaries, what do I have to offer a Beginning Lawyer who isn't even sure they even want to practice in my area of specialty?
Facilitating the Group Mentoring events is a very labor intensive and unforeseen, responsibility of my job. I would like to do more - and better - but we are a 2 person department, so we do the best we have with what we have.
We've had to tweak it time and again. We will keep trying. And, at events like this, I will keep right on asking folks like you if you have found a solution that does not fall short of the glory of perfection.
I need to move on to the next point, but I can say that the advent of Group Mentoring has revealed a related and much more fundamental reality - no mentoring program, no matter how well designed or successful, will constitute the magical cure for someone who doesn't have any idea what to do with their new law license in particular, or in some cases, their life in general.
Put another way, perhaps one side effect of our mandatory mentoring program is that it forces a newly admitted lawyer to "have a plan". It is harder for a Beginning Lawyer in Georgia to lead an unexamined life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing. Well, enough of Group Mentoring.
Inside Mentoring: First, recall that Inside Mentoring accounts for 80% of our total. We believe that it works very well. It allows Beginning Lawyers to complete their initial CLE requirements in a way that compliments their actual practice setting, instead of having to sit through a one-time "one size fits all" Bridge the Gap type program.
Our insistence on a mentoring plan which includes a professionalism emphasis means that the Beginning Lawyer's has an ongoing discussion about professionalism issues with a Mentor from the start.
Inside Mentoring is relatively easy for us to monitor. Now, these are the things that work well about Inside Mentoring.
Here's what may not work well about Inside Mentoring - we simply do not have any control over whether or not a Beginning Lawyer goes to work for a jerk.
If the Inside Mentor says "just sign my name to it and send it in" and generally treats them in a non-professional manner, there's not much we can do about it frankly. Our Committee debated long and hard about how to possibly prevent this problem area. In the end, we did implement minimum requirements for Mentors, but past that, we all realized that we had to accept this risk.
Now, I have learned that this set-up may fly in the face of studies detailing how mentoring relationships may actually form and develop, but I have also learned this reality - any attempt to dictate to Georgia lawyers who could or could not mentor their new employees in their law firms would fail - and our program would have never been approved.
Some firms assign Inside Mentors one-on-one, some don't. Some firms assign Inside Mentors who are direct supervisors, some don't. We gave up control of those decisions because we had to do so in order to gain broad based support for a mandatory mentoring program.
I have fielded some calls from Beginning Lawyers who reported, in essence, that they were working for real jerks. But thankfully, those calls have been a rare handful out of 4,600 Beginning Lawyers over 5 years.
Outside Mentoring. First, the bad news, then the good news. Here's what does not work well about our Outside Mentoring - lack of Mentor volunteers in certain practice areas.
Try as I might, I have never had any volunteers in the following areas: real estate; sports and entertainment; and estate planning. Having been in solo practice myself, I think I know why. It's probably unrealistic to expect that you can open a solo practice in these areas - especially in metro-Atlanta, unless you have some kind of unique relationship or tie-in. Real estate, to the extent it exists right now, is big volume done by big boutiques that are proprietary if not predatory about their client base. The other two areas are narrow niches. Trying to explain to Beginning Lawyers why practice areas they are interested in are not feasible in the marketplace of their choosing is labor intensive.
Here's the good news. Other than that, Outside Mentoring works really great! It is great for the budding solo practitioner, it is great for the profession, and it is great for the public. We have many, many success stories by now. I am glad to say that hardly one week goes by without one of our solo practitioners dropping off a thank you note, or dropping by in person to report on how they learned how to run a business and also how to practice law - both at the same time thanks to their Outside Mentor.
More so than any other area of our program, our Outside Mentors are the ones who regularly report that their own professional lives have been re-energized and revitalized by helping a Beginning Lawyer start their own practice the right way.
So, overall, our mandatory mentoring program continues to succeed wonderfully. I am pleased, but I am not proud.
We are always happy to help others learn from our successes and our failures. I am flattered, but I am not infallible.
It took a long time to build the consensus we needed. Those experiences have taught me that there are both peaks and valleys in any program that is a "sea change". My confidence in our program is tempered with a healthy dose of caution. I am ever on the lookout to diligently tweak what needs to be tweaked. I believe our program is on a good path, but I will never claim that we have arrived.
David Brinkley put it this way, upon winning his first Emmy - and this fits my feeling perfectly: "Success is fun, if you realize it's temporary and you don't inhale." So, in Georgia, we are having some fun, but we have not inhaled.
At all times, we are ultimately in the hands of the continued professionalism of Georgia's experienced lawyers who are willing to serve as Mentors. We have set a good table, but they serve up the food - good or bad.
I'll close with my favorite evaluation comments that we have received - from a Beginning Lawyer: "You have given me a safe place to ask a stupid question"; and from a Mentor: "You have restored my faith in our profession."
- 30 -
Monday, July 26, 2010
Spotlight
Congratulations! You've found the very first Spotlight story on this new website sponsored by ALI-ABA and ACLEA (the Association of Continuing Legal Education Administrators)!
The site is one of the action platforms growing out of the 2009 Summit Conference on Equipping Our Lawyers and seeking implementation of the Recommendations of the Conference.
Covering recommendations for law school education, bar admissions, transition education, in-practice CLE and mandatory CLE programs and even in-house training for lawyers, the Recommendations cover the whole continuum. And so will this website and its companion enewsletter.
Key features of the site are...
- Spotlight This feature article will cover key developments related to lawyers' education with a new Spotlight posted every 10-14 days and previous Spotlights kept in the site's archives. Note that registered readers will be invited to post comments on all Spotlight and News stories, and their comments will also be archived.
- Latest News This website section - below - will offer shorter news items on the Recommendations and legal education developments related to them. We invite your comments for News items as well.
- Take Action This section, below, gives you an evolving list of ways YOU can actively support implementation of the Recommendations. We hope you'll join in!
- Organizational Links & Resources This section gives you direct access to a world of websites sites, blogs, reports and other items for quick research on what's happening and what leaders are thinking related to all aspects of legal education today. It is an evolving list, and we invite your suggestions for additional resources to list.
- Discuss Want to join in a current discussion on an aspect of legal education that particularly interests you? Discuss is your ticket! See the section on the upper right side of this page. Join in a discussion - after you register - or start your own discussion. You're sure to find others with similar interests.
- Summit Recommendations Of course the 16 Recommendations themselves are right at hand in the section below along with the Reporter's comments for quick reference.
- Upcoming Spotlights Upcoming Spotlights will feature an update on the Georgia Transition to Practice mentoring program by director Doug Ashworth, the St. Thomas Law School Mentor Externship program by its director Dave Bateson, and much more.
Monday, July 26, 2010
New York State Bar Association Task Force to Examine Legal Profession, Recommend Changes to Improve Legal Education and the Practice of Law
Incoming New York State Bar President Stephen P. Younger has appointed a 30-member task force consisting of law firm partners, law school professors, and in-house attorneys, to weigh changes in the profession brought on by the society and culture, recession and advances in technology. It will be co-chaired by Linda Addison, Fulbright & Jaworski, New York City and T. Andrew Brown, Brown & Hutchinson, Rochester. The group held its first meeting in June.
The task force will consider changes in law firm billing practices, improvements in legal education and training, work/life balance, and the application and use of new technologies, among other issues.
Younger was quoted in the New York Law Journal as saying that "2009 was the worst year in history to be a lawyer in New York."
The task force is expected to complete a draft report in early January 2011. The state bar's House of Delegates will then consider it as early as April 2011. Several leaders from the ALI-ABA Summit on Equipping Our Lawyers are members of the Task Force and, of course, many Recommendations of the Summit bear directly on the education issues the Task Force is expected to address.
The task force will consider changes in law firm billing practices, improvements in legal education and training, work/life balance, and the application and use of new technologies, among other issues.
Younger was quoted in the New York Law Journal as saying that "2009 was the worst year in history to be a lawyer in New York."
The task force is expected to complete a draft report in early January 2011. The state bar's House of Delegates will then consider it as early as April 2011. Several leaders from the ALI-ABA Summit on Equipping Our Lawyers are members of the Task Force and, of course, many Recommendations of the Summit bear directly on the education issues the Task Force is expected to address.
Monday, July 26, 2010
New York Law School and Harvard Law School Host Year-Long Contest of Ideas About Legal Education
According to Summit participant Sari Fried-Fiori, the goal is to come up with operational alternatives to the traditional law school business model and to identify concrete steps for the implementation of new designs. The kickoff event was a two-day conference for educators, employers, and regulators at New York Law School on April 9-10 to identify problems, innovations, and constraints, and to organize working groups to develop designs and strategies for implementation. Working groups will refine their ideas and reconvene for a second meeting at Harvard Law School October 15-16, 2010. Final designs will be presented, with commentary, at New York Law School in April 2011.
Several participants in the Summit are active in the project, and Summit recommendations may well be raised in its deliberations.
Several participants in the Summit are active in the project, and Summit recommendations may well be raised in its deliberations.
Monday, July 26, 2010
New Jersey Launches Mandatory CLE Amid Distance Learning Issues
New Jersey's new mandatory CLE rule goes into effect with a unique limit on accreditation of distance learning programs. According to NJ Board on Continuing Legal Education Wendy Weiss, "For live credit to be offered, the speaker must be in the same room as the participants. The only exception will be for attendees viewing the program from an overflow room in the same location as the live event (participants could walk into the live room with the speaker to interact and ask questions as any attendee in the same room with the speaker)."
