‘Mentor: A Trusted Counselor or Guide’
— Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
By Dan Murdock, OBA General Counsel

The month of May is graduation time. It is a time for those graduating to celebrate and look back and enjoy their accomplishments. It is also, however, a time of uncertainty and perhaps fear of what the future holds.

In the past, many young lawyers just out of law school began their legal career by working as an associate in a firm wherein older, more mature, and hopefully, more knowledgeable lawyers could provide guidance and counsel to the new admittee by sharing their legal experience and expertise. However, in today’s legal world, that mentoring occurs less and less. Perhaps it is caused by the demands and complexities of the current legal environment. Perhaps the older lawyers don’t want to be of assistance. There can be many reasons but I think the main reason is that we just don’t think about it. We have other things to do.

The Preamble to the Rules Creating and Controlling the Oklahoma Bar Association tells us that the OBA is an association of members of the Bar of the State of Oklahoma and that the association has as one of its duties, inter alia, to encourage practices that will advance and improve the honor and dignity of the legal profession. Mentoring is such a practice.

We all have had mentors in our lives. Perhaps mentors we saw every day from childhood to our life as an adult. Perhaps we admired someone who we never met but only knew about from television or the printed media. From parents to little league coaches, from teachers to church leaders, from family friends to relatives, we have been influenced by someone. Even when we near the end of our career, that mentoring process continues.

Recently the Green Bay Packers, (a National League Football team for those uninterested in sports), drafted a recent college graduate as their quarterback of the future. He will probably not play very much but will be the understudy to the future Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. Favre will be his mentor, teaching him the skills and guiding him in the ways of professional football. The same idea will work in the practice of law. The new lawyer doesn’t have to be an employee. You don’t even need to know them personally. Maybe the mentoring is a friendly smile, a word of encouragement or recognition of a job well done. It takes very little to be a mentor but it means so very much to those who are just beginning their legal career.

Maybe it will work for the Green Bay Packers. I know that it will work for the Oklahoma Bar Association.

1. Rules Creating and Controlling the Oklahoma Bar Association, 5 O.S. ch. 1, app. 1 (2004)