Workplace Mentoring in the Legal Profession

The purpose of this article is to direct the attention of economists to the phenomenon of workplace mentoring. There are indications that the incidence of mentor-protege relationships in certain occupations and industries is as high as 75 percent or more. This fact notwithstanding, the economics literature generally (and labor economics literature specifically) is virtually silent with respect to mentoring. By way of introducing the subject matter to the profession, we focus attention on mentoring in the legal profession. We are able to provide lower-bound estimates of the incidence of mentoring among lawyers. We then propose and discuss two explanations of the practice. In brief, mentoring (generally) may serve to: (1) enhance the efficiency of job matching, and (2) reduce employee turnover and enhance worker investment in firm-specific human capital by bonding workers and firms more closely together. At this early stage, we are able to report some evidence in support of function (2). In a survey of top business executives, Roche [22] found that 63.5 percent of the 1,250 respondents had a mentor, defined as "a person who took a personal interest in your career and who guided or sponsored you." Nearly as many of these executives (61.6 percent) had served in a mentoring capacity themselves. America and Anderson [1] found that 53 percent of 1,050 female corporate officers surveyed reported having had a mentor/protege relationship. The evidence suggests that mentor-protege relationships are a common labor market phenomenon, at least in certain occupational classifications. Roche found that initial attachment to a mentor generally occurs during the first five years of an individual's career. However, since respondents who reported having such a relationship averaged 2 mentors, he noted considerable attachment to mentors during the proteges' 6th-10th years of career. Most respondents reported that their mentors exerted a substantial influence on their career. Those executives who had a mentor averaged 47.3 years in age and $118,900 in salary, whereas executives who did not have a mentor averaged 49.2 years in age and $114,200 in salary. Finally, Roche noted that 50 percent of executives who had a mentor reported being