EP 812- Mentorship within the Firm Part One

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Heels in the Courtroom, a podcast about successfully navigating law and life featuring the women trial attorneys at the Simon Law Firm.

Erica Slater:

Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Heels in the Courtroom. This is Erica Slater, and today I’m joined by Liz Levy, Amy Gunn and Elizabeth McNulty. Today we are going to talk about mentorship from kind of both sides of the aisle, if you will, both being a mentor and how to be a successful mentee. So in the next couple of weeks, we, as you guys may know, we are a firm of 14 lawyers, but we have 25 law students and college students that will be starting over the summer working at our firm. So we have an influx of young, eager minds coming in to help us out with our work. This is always an exciting time around the firm because first of all, we have full-time help over the summer. All of our law student law clerks are doing work that otherwise I would be doing so I’m happy to have them, but also our clerkship lasts a year long.

So our clerks work during their next school year for the most part, at least our law students. And because of that, they have a long experience here that we hope is very formative as they’re learning how to apply what they’re learning at school to actual practice. So today we’re going to talk a little bit about what we’ve learned over the years from our perspective being mentors to these young law students, but also specifically Liz, Elizabeth and I all clerked at our firm and we remember we’re close enough to our experience to remember what made us successful enough. Clerks, I don’t know, here we are, so we must not have totally messed it up, but when we’re thinking about how we engage these students and become good mentors, Amy, you’ve always been extremely intentional about mentorship. I’ve noticed, first of all, is that intentional or is it just who you are? And second, what approach do you take to make those connections successful?

Amy Gunn:

Thank you. I noticed that you very clearly indicated I was not a Law clerk here,

Erica Slater:

So you were not

Amy Gunn:

I was not. I was not.

Erica Slater:

No, you just had A trial as John’s opposing counsel, right?

Amy Gunn:

That was trial enough. Trial at the trial. So both in answer to the first question, if I’m going to spend time with people, I want it to be meaningful. I want both, especially in a work situation. I think it’s always important to try to have a cordial, obviously a cordial relationship with the people you’re working with. Get to know them a little bit. It just always seems to me to be a better way to go. And I also think being intentional in my mind just gets better work product. Being intentional in a mentoring sense means being more clear or being clear about your expectations, your goals, and that is easier done if you’re actually sitting talking to someone. So that personal connection, while it’s always hard to find time, this is just a classic issue that we have in our profession and many others, is we have so much work to do and only so much time to do it.

So do you put your head down and just get it done? Is it faster to send somebody an email than to go down and talk to them in their office? Yes, it is. Are the results as efficient and effective? No, they’re not. At least not initially. Maybe after a lengthy relationship at work, understanding how the other person works through emails or personal contact or whatever. After a while you kind of get the groove of it, but at the beginning I think it’s better to sit down and have an initial conversation, learn how folks prefer to be addressed in terms of is it easier to send you an email? Do you prefer I just send you an email? And this is something I’ve struggled with over the years because I am of a generation that is different than the folks coming in and what I think is better to sit face to face. Other perhaps younger folks aren’t as used to that, right? Because all sort of on the phone, no one really talks to each other very much anymore in a social setting even so it might be very uncomfortable for a brand new LawClerk to come in and sit in my office. It might be much more comfortable for them to participate via email or something like that. So I think it’s a matter of just spending the time to get to know people’s preferences and then acting on those.

Erica Slater:

I think too, when I think about engaging with new law clerks and working with them initially, I know that it’s going to take more kind of upfront work like you said, and making sure that you’ve reserved time to set aside, especially after first assignments come back and things like that to provide constructive feedback. I think the work product that you get working with law students ends up being so much better if you can put in the time upfront to kind of teach them how you like things or where they could improve on their writing or something like that. And also I think through that, even that work that we’re doing with law clerks, that’s where the mentorship comes in because you can discuss, I’m asking you to do this because, or you can share, I made this certain mistake one time and this is the lesson I learned.

Let me teach you so you don’t have to do it yourself. I think setting expectation with a mentor and mentee role is really helpful and not only in a situation where you’re employing a LawClerk to work with, but if you are being paired up with someone through an organization, a lot of law associations or even through the law schools will set up mentors and mentees and I think it can be such a productive relationship if everyone’s expectations are set. And it’s great if you click and you’re in great communication all the time. But I think it’s more if you have a more formal relationship, whether it’s employment or you’re set up through an organization, that expectation of we will communicate at least every two weeks by this method or this is how I like to give feedback. For example, when I give an assignment to a clerk, say I want them to draft the first response to a motion and I get their writing back.

If it’s something where I can go through and make quick changes, then I’ll do that myself and ask them to review those changes and then we’ll sit down and talk about it so they have a frame, a point of reference for what I’ve changed. But if I’m looking at something and I’m like, this is all wrong, it’s going to take me longer to work through this, then that’s when I hope that I’ve left enough runway to be able to bring that clerk in and say, you kind of missed what I expected to see and give them another chance and teach them we’re going more this direction with this motion, or there’s a big gap in your research here and allow them to have another shot at it. Throughout the years as I’ve worked with different clerks, I think the most successful ones probably started out more rough and I put more time into giving them feedback and giving them a second chance.

And that’s when I saw the most improvement in their work. And those are probably the clerks that I’ve had a longer standing relationship with because their clerkship was much more dynamic for them. So it sucks, but I think it’s just like the time you put in equals what you get out of it. And on a personal level, I’ve always felt that there’s so much for the mentor to get out of the mentorship as well. And this is going to sound corny, but I just like being around law students. Sometimes they have fresh perspectives. I feel like they help keep me connected to being a young lawyer and it helps me in working with young lawyers in practice too. I mean, I’m not far enough along in practice that I feel like that was ages ago, but it does help me stay connected to different levels of practice to be working with younger attorneys and trying to mention them as well.

Liz Lenivy:

A couple of thoughts and I’ve just been jotting things down. I think you both have made really good points and I want to piggyback off of a couple of them. First, I’ll start off with where you just left off, Erica, talking about working with soon to be attorneys. And something that I’ve noticed that I really appreciate when I think about this mentor mentee relationship and what do I get out of it, is this level of enthusiasm that sometimes I think we lose because this job is a real grind. So seeing someone with a fresh perspective, seeing someone with energy come in and maybe the thought of writing yet another motion to compel feels incredibly daunting for us. But for someone who’s never done it before and it’s their first time getting to feel like a real lawyer, it’s exciting for them. And so getting to see that enthusiasm does tend to rub off on me.

I feel a little bit like in the story of the Grinch, his heart grew three sizes that day. I’m like, okay, maybe I can try to use this for my benefit as well. But another thing you mentioned, Erica, was how do we give feedback? And so something that I have been working on and something that I’ve developed for myself, because sometimes unfortunately we don’t have enough time to allow the clerk a second opportunity to try to write that response or try to get that letter out or something like that. And I used to just basically take whatever they would give me and then I would rewrite it on that same document. And then I started thinking about it and I’m like, when I send this back though, they’re not going to know what changes I made. So how can they know how to improve if they haven’t seen what changes I have provided or how I want things structured?

And so it’s a bit more daunting. It takes up a little bit more space, but I will basically take their work, copy it into a separate document to title it, final document, final draft. This is the one that needs to go out. And I will rewrite it that way. And then I will send them both documents back and I’ll say, this is the original draft you sent me. This is the final draft. I want you to compare them so you can see what changes I’ve made. Now obviously if it’s one where it’s like little grammar errors, otherwise it’s fine, I’ll just do a red line change and then that one’s an easy enough. But if it’s something that’s big and structural that me trying to do red line changes to their original draft is just going to look like a nightmare mess, I’ll just save a completely new draft.

And then I’ll send them both to compare and I’ll expect them to compare those and I’ll say, bring me your questions. We can talk about it. And I’ll say nine times out of 10, the clerk will come back and say, thank you for that. Can I ask why you changed it this way or why you wanted it this way? Or how do I make sure that I presented this in this particular fashion that you wanted in the future? And we have that conversation. And then something that you mentioned, Amy, that I had written down, and then you started talking about it and I was like, oh, perfect. This is the great segue was this email versus face-to-face communication. And another thing that I have tried to develop with law clerks, especially brand new law clerks who are just starting out, they literally know nothing. And that’s how we want them.

That’s how we expect them to come in. And when I was a LawClerk, I didn’t know anything. And so what I will do is a combination of both email and face-to-face communication, starting with email. And I’ll say, Hey, let’s set up a time to talk about this. And I kind of give them a little bit of a synopsis of the situation so they’re not completely caught off guard. They know what case I’m going to talk about. They can go around and poke in the file if they want to, and if I want a certain motion drafted or if I want discovery drafted, I’ll send them or if I can, I’ll try to send them a couple sample discovery motions or whatever. That way they can take a look at it. And when I start using the lingo, they’ve got some reference that I’m not completely catching them off guard.

And I tell them, please review these things before we meet so that when I start talking about a motion to compel or a response motion or a motion for summary judgment, whatever, they’ve got a little bit of understanding coming into it. And then when they are ready to come and talk to me and so we can sit down and have that deeper conversation about whatever is the assignment I want to give them, I feel that oftentimes that also helps them feel more educated so they can ask better questions in that initial meeting. So those are just a couple of the strategies that I’ve figured out I think are the most helpful in training brand new. Just starting out law

Elizabeth McNulty:

Clerks, one of the things that I struggled with the most, probably when I made the transition because I clerked here and then the summer I took theBar, I continued to work here, but I was sort of an attorney, so I wasn’t a clerk anymore, but I wasn’t really a full fledged attorney, but there were clerks that were helping on the team I was at, so they were kind of reporting to me. It’s kind of an awkward spot to be in. And then as I made the transition, I was obviously a very young attorney in more of a mentor role, and I was a bit daunting to take on as being such a young attorney, and I had a harder time with that to strike that balance between not being too casual, but not being too formal, especially our firm is a pretty relaxed place. I don’t find it to be incredibly stuffy or really formal, but you don’t want to have too casual of a relationship with the clerks because there still needs to be that dynamic of they’re reporting to you and they need to respect you.

So anyone that finds themselves as a young attorney in more of a mentor role, try to think about how you want to approach that situation because it is something that you’re not looking to be their best friend. You still need to be professional, but you don’t want them to be intimidated by you. Because I always felt the better relationships I had with the clerks were the ones that found me to be approachable, especially as one of the younger attorneys at the firm at the time, you want them to feel comfortable coming to you to ask the questions that they find are kind of the dumb ones, which is fine, all just trying to figure out how to practice law. And I get that. And I think probably one of the main things that I tell the clerks, especially like Liz said, we don’t expect them to know a whole lot coming in.

I remember my first day as a clerk, one of the attorneys asked me to draft a petition, and I had literally no idea what that was in my head. It was like a thing that you need to get signatures for. I didn’t ask what that meant, I just went back to my office. I was like, I got to figure out what this is and look at me. I made it all the way here so you’ll figure it out. But I think the thing that I try to tell them is, you’re going to get a bunch of stuff wrong, but the thing that you should really focus on then is the formatting and all those things because you can get that right a hundred percent of the time and your future paralegal will be so happy that you know how to format stuff. And I still remember, and I think I’ve said this before on the podcast when I was turning work into Erica as a clerk and I didn’t have page numbers on something and she was like, you got to put page numbers on stuff. And I think about it almost every day when I add page numbers. So it definitely made

Left an impression on you. It really did. And that it is those little things that clerks can get right when you don’t really know much of anything else. And so I think that that’s something that will really make an impression on no matter what kind of job you’re heading into this summer will make an impression on the people that you’re working for.

Amy Gunn:

A couple of thoughts come to mind, Elizabeth. The first one, the page numbers, a hundred percent don’t ever turn in anything to any lawyer without page numbers on it or any person in business. I don’t know. I don’t understand it. Even if it’s sequentially do it page numbers. So agreed, it’s occurred to me, I think, and y’all can tell me if you agree that it’s important to put on a good face for the profession. So here’s what I mean. I always feel very compelled when I have new clerks in the office to talk up the profession, to talk about how challenging it can be, but also how rewarding and go through all the reasons for that. It doesn’t always fit my mood that day, but the last thing I’d want to have happen is for a LawClerk to work here and look around and the only impression they got from me or some other of us is that it’s a hard job.

It kind of beats you down and it’s really not that great. I feel like I’m failing the profession if that is what they take away, forget the work that they’re doing or what they’re learning, but the overall feeling that this is a great career is something that I really want to portray. Not that it doesn’t have reality involved, and it can be, like I said, challenging or hard, but I think I feel especially compelled when I have women clerks. I think we’re still living in a world where we are the minority in terms of just straight up numbers in the profession, much less partners, much less trial lawyers I may not accomplish in the summer teaching someone how to draft the best petition, but I do want to be the one that teaches this young person that law is a great profession. And I think that I have kind of pulled away from the nitty gritty stuff. Thank God Liz is really good at it, and you tend to be the teacher of the clerks. And I do that too, but I think I really want to impress upon our clerks or anybody who’s interning anywhere at the summer to really try to look at the long-term and whether this is something they want to do. And I hope the answer is yes, particularly for women because it is hard, but it can be really rewarding.

Erica Slater:

On that note, Amy, I had a, and I’ll always remember this, I had a friend in law school who was clerking at a different firm for our last year of law school, and they had offered her a job after graduation and she didn’t have necessarily another option in the wings, but she turned it down and she explained it as after clerking there, she kind of looked around and there’s no one there she wanted to be. And I have to think that her impression was exactly what you’re saying, a bunch of beat down attorneys who didn’t speak well of their opposing counsel or their colleagues or whatever, and it just wasn’t an attractive option. And in my own mind, I know what place she was talking about and they have a good reputation for being great attorneys, and that was kind of disheartening to hear. So I agree that it may not fit your mood that day because, and I think you could say that too.

This isn’t my best day of my whole career, but in general, being a good ambassador of the profession is part of helping young law students keep the enthusiasm as they kind of go through the shit of learning what we do. It’s hard to be kind of an apprentice and it’s hard to absorb everything, but you couldn’t pay me to go back where the same thing that takes me a half hour now took me five hours in my first year of practice because I had every day you felt like you were drinking through a fire hose. And I think that can be really exhausting. So giving some perspective and outlook to people that you are mentoring is really, I think, an important part of, Hey, we’re on the other side of that portion of our career. We love it most days, and you can be successful after you get through this tough learning period of your profession.

Liz Lenivy:

This conversation is reminding me of an incident I had, which is not my proudest moment, but I’m willing to share it here where something, and here’s how bad it was. I can’t even remember what bad thing actually happened, something bad had happened. That’s the

Amy Gunn:

Story of everything, right? That’s the story of memory. You’re never going to remember what exactly it was said, but you’re always going to remember how you felt about it.

Liz Lenivy:

In the moment though, it felt like my world was collapsing. Whatever bad thing happened, it was the worst thing that could have ever happened to anyone that I cannot remember now. But I had made a pretty flip comment to a paralegal, not rude, I wasn’t criticizing her. I was basically kind of getting down on myself in the job, and I made some comment about really love this job, and I probably use some more colorful language in that situation, but I did not recognize in that moment that when I made the comment to the paralegal who was also sort of in the same boat as me, we were both kind of commiserating together about how bad whatever this thing was was. And I was standing outside of the law clerk’s office and their door was open, and I didn’t realize one of ’em was sitting in there and she heard my comment and she had said something to me later, kind of joking, I think, trying to make me feel better.

But in that moment, I was like, man, she heard me say that. She heard me make this comment. And I went back and I later apologized to her and I was like, Hey, that wasn’t appropriate. I shouldn’t have said that out in the hallway like that. I think I just kind of got caught up in the moment. But I don’t want you to think that every day is like that here or that this is not something we’re going to be able to get past. We sat down, we strategized. I’m still not happy with the situation, but we’re going to figure it out. And the thing that I learned in that moment, and now in reflecting on that story is that unless something is really, really terrible, you’re not going to remember it. And you should not act like everything is nuclear. And keeping things in perspective is something that comes with age.

Because something that would have absolutely destroyed me five years ago is now something that I’m like, well, I’m going to be pissed until about and then I’ll be okay. Right? So that’s the other thing that I think is really important to teach young lawyers is that this, and Erica, you’ve hit the nail on the head as far as there is an other side to it. You’re going to feel terrible in the moment, and that’s part of the growing pains of this job, and that’s what makes you a better lawyer. I can’t think of any single great lawyer whose career I admire who has not gone through some hell at multiple times during their career. And that’s something that I want to make sure that law students understand is that there’s going to be really bad days, but there’s going to be really good days, and you just kind of got to find a way to work through both of them.

Erica Slater:

Well, we focused our discussion today on talking about being a successful mentor within our firm and working with our incoming law students and college students. Next time on part two, we’ll be talking about what makes a successful mentee and really making inroads through your clerkships and those mentor and mentee relationships. Join us next time for part two. Thanks for listening.

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