What did you learn from your legal mentor? And mentors, what have you learned from your mentees?
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Last week, career coach Cordell Parvin wrote a pair of posts about a mentor-mentee relationship between a partner and an associate at Canadian law firm Bennett Jones.
Associate Christie Conway told Parvin that one thing her mentor, partner Greg Liakopoulos, did that helped build trust “was establish a policy that ‘a draft is a draft’” and let her know “that the work I did for him was always going to be judged first on effort, not degrees of perfection. The emphasis was never just on whether I found the right answer, but how I got to the answer and what alternative answers might exist.”
Liakopoulos told Parvin that he had initially viewed mentoring “as a one-way teaching and learning experience. Recently, I have discovered it is a two-way learning experience as I am learning from Christie. I am a better lawyer having her on my team.”
Last week’s question about generational differences in the workplace prompted many to share their conflicts and frustrations, leaving us thirsty for stories about lawyers—perhaps from different generations, perhaps not—who are helping each other out. So this week, we ask you: What did you learn from your legal mentor? And mentors, what have you learned from your mentees?
Answer in the comments.
Read the answers to last week’s question: What differences have you seen among the baby boomers, Gen Xers and millennials in your workplace?
Featured answer:
Posted by Sasha Boersma: “Technology, technology, technology. As a millennial and 2013 law grad, a substantial part of all of my positions both during and after law school has been helping coworkers with technology issues. I have no formal tech training, but the way I think about and interact with technology is very different compared to my colleagues who are older than me.”
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