From the President

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal,Georgia
• Citation: Vol. 27 No. 2 Pg. 0006
• Pages: 0006
• Publication year: 2021

From the President No. Vol. 27 No. 2 Pg. 6 Georgia Bar Journal October, 2021

The Value of Mentorship

ELIZABETH L. FITE. J.

President

State Bar of Georgia

president@gabar.org

If you read the August edition of the

Georgia Bar Journal, you know that I cut my proverbial teeth in the legal field under the guidance of an influential mentor, Allen Roberts, who was a successful sole practitioner in my hometown.

Working for Allen as a high school senior and when I was home on breaks from college, I had the opportunity to get hands-on experience in a wide variety of legal tasks in the office and at the courthouse. Even more valuable was the chance to soak up the wisdom of someone who had practiced law for several decades.

In late July, I attended this year's graduation ceremony for the Mentorship Academy of the State Bar's Labor & Employment Law Section. It was inspiring to hear the success stories from this year's class of mentees and mentors—the fruits of their commitment to the betterment of the labor and employment law profession in our state.

It also made me remember my time with Allen Roberts as a student in Arkansas, as well as the many experienced attorneys and judges I have learned and continued to learn from as a lawyer here in Georgia. Mentorship has always been important to me, and I think it is critically important to the profession.

The value of mentoring is not lost on the State Bar of Georgia or the dozens of other state bars around the country that have implemented formal mentoring programs for young and new lawyers.

Most of us can point to at least one instance where the support and tutelage of a more experienced attorney helped carry us from what we learned in law school to the real-world practice of law.

An ongoing, structured mentoring relationship similar to those facilitated by our State Bar's Transition Into Law Practice Program is, obviously, beneficial beyond measure to the mentee. But the experienced attorney doing the mentoring also benefits from the opportunity to give back to the profession and remain current and active in a time-commitment-heavy yet rewarding program for all involved.

As a unified State Bar, we are at the service of every lawyer in Georgia. We don't represent the interests of any one group over another. The reason our original State Bar bylaws provide for the establishment of practice area sections is "to afford a medium whereby members of the Bar interested in a...