Court, Bar to investigate mentoring requirement: 'all I ask is that you have an open mind'.

Florida Supreme Court Justice Raoul Cantero has announced the Supreme Court's Commission on Professionalism and The Florida Bar are establishing a joint committee to study mandatory mentoring for all new Bar members.

Cantero reported on the subject at the Bar Board of Governors' June 1 meeting in Key West.

He said at a recent retreat the commission heard a report on the State Bar of Georgia's first-in-the-nation required mentoring program for its new bar members.

"We were excited on hearing about it and I wanted to share that excitement with you," Cantero told the board. "We decided we would appoint a committee to study the issue of mandatory mentoring in Florida. How would that work? How much would it cost?

"Do not be nervous. Right now, we are just in the investigative stage. All I ask is that you have an open mind," he added. "The goal [for the Georgia program] was for a beginning lawyer to have meaningful access to an experienced lawyer for necessary skills, the things that aren't taught in law school."

Cantero made two points to the board. The first was that both he and incoming Bar President Frank Angones would appoint members to the committee. And secondly, any mentoring program would likely be smaller than expected. With the Georgia program, he said, only a small percentage of new lawyers required mentors.

The Georgia program recognized there are three kinds of mentoring: inside mentoring given to new lawyers when they join existing law firms, group mentoring, and individual mentoring. The latter is for lawyers who have just graduated law school, can't find a job, and so open their own law offices. That's the group the mentoring program is aimed at, Cantero said.

The Georgia program began in 2006, and 85 percent of the new lawyers were covered by in-house mentoring programs. That meant the firms provided the mentors for the new lawyers and didn't have to rely on the state bar to provide them, he said. That in-house number was 72 percent for 2007.

Of the other new lawyers, about half were covered by group mentoring and the remainder needed mentors assigned from the statewide program. Cantero said in 2006, of 704 new admittees in Georgia, only 47 required bar-provided mentors--and several times that number of experienced lawyers signed up to be mentors.

"They had more mentors than young lawyers; they had mentors with no one to 'ment,' because they didn't have enough young lawyers to go around," he said with a chuckle. "God willing, we would have that problem."

Extrapolating from the Georgia experience, Cantero said he would expect that about 300 of the Bar's 2,100 annual new admittees would require mentors.

The Georgia program also works in conjunction with CLE programs for new bar members, and the justice said he would expect any program in Florida would do the same, including tie-ins with the Young Lawyers Division's Practicing with Professionalism program all new members must attend.

Georgia mentoring guidelines call for the mentor to show the new lawyer around the experienced lawyer's office and introduce the staff, accompany the new lawyer to local bar and other legal organization meetings, discuss local practice norms, including unwritten etiquette and civility rules, and talk about pro bono, charitable, and civic activities.

"These are things we want young lawyers to be involved in," Justice Cantero said.

Discussions also cover law office management issues such as billing, keeping a docket, client relations, and document retention.

Feedback from the Georgia program, which took 10 years to set up, has been extremely positive, he noted, with 97 percent of the mentors and 92 percent of the young lawyers indicating the program is accomplishing its goals.

"We thought we should appoint a committee to discuss the issue and answer the questions: Should we have mandatory mentoring in Florida? Should it be along the lines of the Georgia model? Should it work with Practicing with Professionalism?" Cantero said.

"We have not made any judgment, yet. We have not said, 'Let's do mentoring.' But we think this is an exciting issue and it addresses a lot of issues concerning young lawyers and mentoring. It will help us do something concrete about the ongoing problem of professionalism."

Any mentoring program will likely have a fiscal impact on the Bar, Cantero said, but it might not be a large one. He said the entire Georgia program is run by a two-person staff, and noted that unlike The Florida Bar, the Georgia bar does not have a professionalism center. The Bar's Henry Latimer Center for Professionalism might be able to oversee such a program without a large additional expense, he said.

In response to questions from board members, Cantero said the committee should look at allowing mentors to fulfill some of their professionalism CLE requirements and annual pro bono work through their mentoring efforts. He also said new lawyers in Georgia do not have to wait to open an office until they complete the mentoring, but can begin practicing while simultaneously participating in the mentoring project.

More information about the Georgia program can be found on the Georgia bar's Web site at www.gabar.org/programs/ transition_into_law_practice_program/.

Gary Blankenship

Senior Editor