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With promotions season kicking off 1 July, a Clayton Utz lawyer has shared how law firms can offer genuine mentoring to help drive success for the up-and-comers.
Speaking on an episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show, Clayton Utz special counsel Jennifer Harris offered up some insights on mentoring young lawyers, and what law firms can be doing better to move them through the ranks.
“You have to be really committed to giving feedback and to reporting back and telling the people that organise it how it’s going, what can be done better, what’s working and what’s not working — and to do so without breaching confidence.
“… It’s about having avenues for people to report things back and balancing that with never breaching confidence, because it doesn’t work if the mentee cannot trust you, or conversely, that you can’t trust the mentee.”
Ms Harris noted that there can be some risk in young lawyers not having a good mentoring relationship at work.
“By mentor I mean anyone that you can talk to. At my firm now, Clayton Utz, we've got all sorts of structured programmes and everything, but I [also] mentor people informally. It might be a person that comes to me for whatever reason,” she explained.
“I think the risk is if you don't have someone that you can talk to, that you can trust and share your vulnerabilities with and know that you're not going be laughed at or held back or criticised or judged, you can withdraw and you can really think, ‘Well, I'm not suited to this. I'll just leave’. You can make rash decisions.
“So from that perspective, and if I, with people that I mentor like the younger lawyers, if they know someone that's in that position and they don't have a mentor, the first thing I say is, ‘Look, have they got one? Do they need one? Can we get them one?’ Because I think it can really help. Especially as a young lawyer when you don't really know all the sort of steps along the road yet.”
However, it’s not just the young guns that can benefit from a mentoring relationship, Ms Harris notes, adding that Clayton Utz’s structured, but also ad hoc programmes, encourage a no one size fits all approach.
“They're very structured in the sense that we offer them at different levels to different people. So there are graduates, and then there are the lawyers that haven't gone through the graduate programme. Then at the senior level, you can get access to a partner. So you can have a partner mentor,” Ms Harris explained.
“But like most developmental, mentoring programmes, it's led by the mentee. So I never chase after my people. If they don't want to see me for one month, two months, whatever, I just leave it up to them and that's how it is.
“I think they do all the work behind the scenes in the matching of the mentor and the mentee to make sure they get the best match and I've often given the feedback that they do that very well. All the ones that I've had have been people that I'm able to work with really well and for whatever reason, whatever I've had to offer them, suited them. So all the matching behind the scenes is done by them. And then it's just up to the mentoring couple to organise it.
“Whether you have a coffee, whether you have lunch, whether you go for a walk, whatever, it's up the mentee to work out when they want to see you.”
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Emma Ryan and Jerome Doraisamy
