Mentoring the lawyer, past and present: some reflections.

• Date: 22 December 2010
• Author: Ashenhurst, Veronica H.

Mentorship is a central component of a lawyer's education: it involves a reciprocal relationship between a senior and junior lawyer, fostered in the workplace or broader professional community. Today, the Canadian legal profession is devoting significant energy to creating formal mentoring programs beyond articling. Yet concern about mentoring exists in the profession despite additional program creation. This article posits that the history of lawyer mentoring helps explain current mentoring challenges. Historical impressions of mentorship in the province of Ontario suggest the endeavour succeeded when lawyers created relational rapport and fostered welcoming workplaces and professional communities. Mentoring suffered, meanwhile, when lawyers neglected relationships and fostered inhospitable workplace and community norms. Analysis of mentoring today suggests a historical continuity to lawyer mentoring challenges. Specifically, and despite increased mentoring program creation, lawyers still grapple--as they did historically--to establish mentoring bonds and foster supportive workplace-community norms. Understanding this continuity may help the profession better fulfil its responsibilities to the next generation of lawyers.

Le mentorat est une composante essentielle de la formation d'un avocat en ce qu'il implique une relation de reciprocite entre un avocat experimente et un avocat debutant qui se developpe dans le milieu de travail ou dans la communaute professionnelle elargie. De nos jours, la profession juridique canadienne deploie des efforts considerables envers la creation de programmes de mentorat etablis qui vont au-dela du stage en droit traditionnel. Des craintes sont cependant exprimees au sujet du mentorat dans la profession et ce, malgre la creation de programmes supplementaires. Dans cet article, l'auteur postule que l'histoire du mentorat entre avocats permet d'expliquer les defis qui se posent a l'heure actuelle pour le mentorat. Les traces historiques de mentorat que l'on note dans la province de l'Ontario laissent penser que le mentorat etait florissant lorsque des avocats nouaient une veritable relation et rendaient le milieu de travail et les communautes professionnelles plus accueillants. En revanche, le mentorat en subissait les consequences negatives des que les avocats negligeaient ces relations et s'ingeniaient a rendre inhospitaliers le milieu de travail et les normes en vigueur dans la communaute professionnelle. Une analyse du mentorat tel qu'il se pratique de nos jours montre une continuite historique dans les defis qui se posent au mentorat entre avocats. En particulier, et malgre le nombre croissant de programmes de mentorat, les avocats doivent encore se battre, comme ils et elles l'ont toujours fait, pour etablir des relations de mentorat et instaurer un milieu de travail et des normes favorables a la bonne marche d'un mentorat. La profession, en prenant conscience de la dynamique de cette continuite, pourra ainsi mieux assumer ses responsabilites pour la prochaine generation de juristes.

Table of Contents I. INTRODUCTION II. TOWARD A FRAMEWORK TO UNDERSTAND MENTORSHIP III. A HISTORICAL SKETCH OF LAWYER MENTORING IN ONTARIO A. Historical Impressions of Quality Lawyer Mentoring B. Historical Impressions of Mentoring Challenges IV. LAWYER MENTORING TODAY A. Current Mentoring Initiatives: Mixed Sentiment About Lawyer Mentoring B. Understanding Concerns About Lawyer Mentoring Today: Insights From History 1. The Relational Facet of Mentorship: Past and Present 2. The Workplace-Community Facet of Mentorship: Past and Present V. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION

Invite a lawyer to reminisce about his or her mentors and the lawyer will often gladly hold forth. Understandably so, for the mentoring experience is a formative part of a new lawyer's education. By "mentoring," I mean a reciprocal relationship between a senior lawyer (the mentor) and a junior lawyer (the protege), fostered to advance the protege 's professional development, but also benefiting the mentor and the legal profession more broadly. (1) Today, the Canadian legal profession relies on the articling relationship between student and principal as a main vehicle for mentorship. But Canadian law firms, law societies and law associations are also now creating additional formal mentoring programs to help novice lawyers transition to practice after call to the Bar, and provide continuity to their professional growth after the more structured learning environment of articles. Similar mentoring program efforts are gaining momentum in the United States, where one commentator speaks of a "renaissance" or "revival" in lawyer mentoring. (2)

Despite the growth of formal mentoring programs, palpable unease exists among some members of the profession that lawyers are not being effectively mentored. At the same time, little scholarly work has been done in Canada to understand the history of lawyer mentoring. Inadequate knowledge about the history of mentorship deprives the profession from meaningfully building on the successes of the past and from understanding continuity and change in lawyer mentoring challenges across the decades.

This article, a reflective piece rather than a systematic study, is modest in its aims. Part I anchors the reader in the subject of mentorship. Drawing on Adelle Blackett's work, it emphasizes that mentoring straddles the public--private divide: it is a relationship between two people, but happens in the public, workplace sphere. Part II begins preliminary study into the history of lawyer mentoring in the province of Ontario, with a focus on the nineteenth century and the first two-thirds of the twentieth. The historical impressions suggest a variegated mentoring history, where mentoring success depended upon lawyers' capacity to forge meaningful ties with newcomers, and foster hospitable workplaces and professional communities. Part III offers a tentative answer to explain why an increase in lawyer mentoring initiatives in Canada today coexists with concern about lawyer mentoring among some members of the profession. I posit that the uneven history of lawyer mentoring helps explain today's mentoring challenges. Crucially, and despite program creation, lawyers continue to grapple--as they did historically--with the relational and workplace-community facets of mentoring. Program creation alone may thus be insufficient to support quality mentorship. I conclude by offering avenues for further thought and research on this important subject.

2. Toward a framework to understand mentorship

   Each lawyer is responsible for his or her own professional development. Yet, new lawyers cannot fully develop unless others assist them along the way, suggesting the profession also has a responsibility to mentor newcomers. Scholarly research on mentoring, meanwhile, improves our grasp of the subject and thus helps the profession meet its mentoring responsibility.

   Until about ten years ago, however, little Canadian scholarship had probed lawyer mentoring beyond A. J. Hobbins' careful work chronicling one mentoring relationship between two legal scholars at McGill University. (3) Canadian scholars have entered the new millennium with more zeal for the subject. Erika Abner has analyzed the mentoring experiences of a small cohort of Toronto lawyers and advocates the value of a culture of learning in law firms. (4) Using survey data from Ontario lawyers and law students, Fiona M. Kay has collaborated with various co-authors to affirm mentorship's favourable career impact on both new and established lawyers, (5) and to explain the special value of "multiple mentors" on a lawyer's career. (6) Finally, Adelle Blackett has published important work on mentoring across difference in the legal profession, although her focus is not specifically Canadian. (7)

   No single definition of lawyer mentoring frames the scholarly work to date. I draw from recent work on lawyer mentoring and the broader mentoring scholarship to offer this definition: mentoring is a reciprocal personal relationship forged in the workplace or broader professional community between a more experienced, more powerful, and usually older lawyer (the mentor), and a less experienced, less powerful and usually younger lawyer (the protege). (8) The primary purpose of this relationship is to foster the protege 's professional development, not only by helping the protege "work toward ... professional goals," (9) but also by guiding him or her to "internaliz[e] the principles of professionalism." (10)

   The absence of a "comprehensive, integrated theoretical framework to guide mentoring research" (11) compounds the challenge of scholarly reflection in this still emerging field. Canadian work on lawyer mentoring has drawn on theories about learning as a social process, (12) and also on theoretical frameworks emphasizing the social networking benefits of mentorship. (13) Such theories are helpful, but they do not, alone, adequately highlight the uniqueness of the mentorship experience. Blackett's work begins to probe this uniqueness by positing that mentoring is a "hybrid" creature along "the public--private continuum." (14) Mentoring is a personal relationship between two people, but "forged largely through interactions within the public, workplace contexts." (15) Understanding the dual character of mentorship advances the definition of mentoring and helps build a framework to guide research. It frames the benefits of mentorship and the factors likely to influence it for good or ill.

   At the heart of the relational, quasi-private, facet of mentorship is interpersonal rapport between mentor and protege. Without some bond between mentor and protege, the activity cannot fairly be termed mentoring. So, when a new lawyer admires and emulates the practice and professionalism of a more senior lawyer from afar, the senior lawyer is, intentionally or not, role-modelling, but he or she is...