With the sudden move to remote working, fostering formal mentoring programmes within a law firm has become more valuable and essential than ever, says Donna Hart, director at The Family Law Company, who outlines the best ways to support professionals of all levels of seniority.
Mentoring is something of a buzzword in many different sectors, from education and nursing to business management – it’s easy to forget what it means, let alone how the concept might translate into a legal environment. And, importantly for the current moment, how has it helped law firms during the Covid-19 pandemic?
Quite simply, mentoring is all about forming friendships and positive working relationships where open discussions can be had. The mentee is essentially responsible for themselves, setting their own goals and targets. However, they do all of this while benefiting from their mentor’s experience and knowledge.
We created a mentoring scheme some years ago at The Family Law Company – for the most part this takes the form of lawyers mentoring junior employees to provide support for their budding legal careers. The scheme has always had significant uptake and has been extremely successful in helping people secure promotions and move forward.
When Covid-19 struck the UK at the end of March 2020, with so many businesses having to close their doors to staff and the public, our mentoring relationships became more important than ever. It became critical to provide support to younger mentees who were suddenly having to manage working from home with the accompanying feelings of isolation, an increase in cases which included a rise in traumatic domestic abuse cases, plus the general anxiety that comes with a global pandemic.
Interestingly, one unexpected result was the rise of reverse mentoring. This turned out to be incredibly valuable in terms of technology, with some of our senior lawyers being mentored by more junior (in terms of legal qualifications) staff, helping them gain knowledge and skills in using social media and IT. In a wider sense, this expedited the sharing of new ideas and fresh ways of thinking. We have certainly benefitted from staff having exposure to colleagues outside of their immediate team, which has opened them up to a better understanding of the company’s ethos and the ‘bigger picture’.
The result is a mentoring scheme with a far more balanced approach, which emphasises to everyone that all team members have something to give – regardless of their role or seniority within the company – which fosters increased confidence in everyone in the company. In fact, this type of mentoring goes a long way to addressing the outdated, hierarchical set-up of some law firms, which can create a culture where there is an unwillingness to change, with a slow uptake of new ideas.
Mentoring has enabled us all to reflect on our goals and practices, and supported some in developing their personal leadership and coaching styles. As a consequence, a number of our lawyers have grown more assured in their ability to mentor students and those outside of the business. The knock-on effect is that even more students keen to take up a career in the legal sector can now receive mentoring, which we hope will encourage them to follow through with their ambitions.