Mentoring, like everything else during this pandemic, is hard. I serve as one of the chairs of my firm’s mentoring program. Pre-pandemic, I took my mentees to lunch once a month, and regularly stopped by their offices to chat and check in. We also had a quarterly lunch where all of the mentors and mentees got together for a group lunch to talk about a variety of topics. In the last few years, we also started having an off-campus social event a few times a year to get together outside of work. As you can imagine, we are not doing these activities right now, or at least not in the same way. In fact, I called one of my mentees the other day and said, “I have been a horrible mentor this last year. I am sorry. I don’t know how to do this remotely.”
And that is the truth, I don’t know how to effectively mentor our young lawyers remotely; it’s a new skill that I am trying to learn, along with taking depositions remotely, conducting a trial remotely, and mediating remotely. It’s all hard, even a year later.
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