Finlay-Jones, J; Ross, N --- "Peer Mentoring for Law Students Improving the First Year Advocacy Experience" [2006] LegEdDig 46; (2006) 14(Spec Ed) Legal Education Digest 24

Peer Mentoring for Law Students — Improving the First Year Advocacy Experience

J Finlay-Jones & N Ross

(2006) 14(Spec Ed) Legal Education Digest 24

40 Law Teacher 1, 2006, pp 23–39

In this paper we describe our experiences of introducing a mentoring program. We analyse the benefits of the program for students and the University and explore the challenges we faced in establishing it.

We introduced the mentoring program to better support first year students when assessable advocacy exercises were introduced. Mentoring is about one person providing support and assistance to another person with less experience to help that person achieve certain goals. It involves collaboration and team work with peers and colleagues. For the relationship to work effectively, mentors need to be able to: listen actively and accurately; observe and reflect back; display empathy; provide information; question; challenge; and give feedback and summarise. This person needs to be able to assume responsibility for their own growth and development and have the potential to succeed in the role they are being assisted with. The mentor provides guidance and help, but it is up to the person being mentored to do the work involved.

Collaboration, team work and the ability to work with other people are core attributes of effective legal practitioners. Mentoring can develop these attributes. Mentoring is an effective way of encouraging reflective and active learning and cooperation amongst students. Mentoring can support professionals making transitions n their lives, including students entering law school and law graduates entering the legal profession.

Peer assisted mentoring schemes can assist with this transition and can turn negative and isolating first year experiences into positive ones. In a mentoring relationship the mentor offers the person being mentored the benefit of experience and personal insight. Peer support programs involving small group learning focused on professional activities, have the potential to increase student involvement, and increase student retention. Valuable aspects of such programs are the rapport between students, involvement with a coach and collaborative work in small groups. The information supportive networks of peer mentoring programs can offer a supportive environment for the first year experience, leading to a reduction of stress and anxiety. There is evidence that having a mentor is a significant factor in employees making a decision to remain in their workplace.

Law students at Newcastle must complete the Core Program before they enter their final two years of study. When students at Newcastle complete the Core Program they must choose whether to complete their final two years of law studies with the more traditional Bachelor of Laws (LLB) or as a Bachelor of Laws and Diploma of Legal Practice (LLB/DipLeg Prac) (‘the Professional Program’). The Professional Program enables students to complete their practical legal training requirements over two years concurrently with the LLB. Professional Program students receive intensive advocacy training. By the time students enter their final semester in fifth year they have completed a wide range of advocacy exercises. During their final semester, they complete another three exercises including mentions and directions hearings, bankruptcy and winding up applications and a contested final hearing before judges of the Family Court of Australia. By this stage of their studies and training, Professional Program students are ideally suited and sufficiently experienced to mentor first year students doing an advocacy exercise for the first time.

The authors were responsible for teaching these two quite different groups of students: law students in their first year of the Core Program and final year students completing both their academic and practical legal training in the Professional Program. The program that evolved has first year students being ‘mentored’ by the more experienced fifth year law students.

Mentoring takes place through a series of scheduled meetings and other interactions between students and mentors. Mentors are familiarised with their role through a training workshop and a written mentor’s guide. The mentors are assessed on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. In order to pass, mentors must complete various tasks to a satisfactory standard and display a professional attitude to their role in the learning process.

There are two schools of thought about the mentoring process. One is that it needs to be facilitated and structured, the other that it must be spontaneous and informal. The mentoring program we established became more structured as it evolved. Our mentoring program developed over a three year period. Changes were progressively introduced based on observation, reflection and student evaluation. The evaluation results indicated a very high level of support for the mentoring program from first year students. The most striking feature of the survey was the availability (or otherwise) of mentor support and this seemed to be the main driver of dissatisfaction with the mentoring program. Almost all the final year mentors provided reflections on the mentoring program, and responses to open-ended questions. Mentoring was seen not only to assist with mooting but with their understanding of the whole university experience.

One of the biggest difficulties in our mentoring program involves the meeting arrangements. To meet this challenge, some meetings are now at scheduled times, but others are flexible, allowing mentors and students to organise them at convenient times. Also a debriefing meeting is held on a day after the moot to enable proper closure of the mentoring relationship.

The evaluation of the program confirms it has been well received by both groups of students and has achieved the objectives it is developed to meet. Mentors and students discussed how much they enjoyed their involvement with each other.

For first year students the mentoring program supplements communication classes in developing advocacy skills through rehearsals and coaching. It reinforces knowledge about and skills in court procedures and court etiquette and provides guidance with planning and organising the moot. It is evident from the evaluation that the mentoring program enhances and develops interpersonal communication and team work skills for both mentor and students.

Mentoring is a process which provides career, professional and personal development. In addition it can support people making transitions in their lives. The mentoring program reduces feelings of isolation and anxiety for first year students. It strengthens student identity and confidence and greatly assists the first year transition to university and law school.

Mentoring enables mentors to enhance their interpersonal communication skills and to consolidate their advocacy skills. Students likewise are encouraged and supported by their mentor to engage in active learning around the advocacy exercise. There are real challenges involved in setting up a mentoring program of the type described in this article but these can be overcome with careful attention to the structure of such a program. There is also a need for more research into the value of mentoring in law school and in the legal profession. There is a paucity of research in this area at present.

We believe that this initiative in mentoring at the University of Newcastle School of Law is meeting significant needs, not only for our students at law school, but for our graduating lawyers, the legal profession and the wider community.