Legal work is a team sport. No one can succeed, either as a lawyer or as a rainmaker, alone. If you’re a partner, you need energetic associates to enliven your practice. And if you’re a baby associate with grand ambitions, you need a senior colleague to light your way and give you the chance to thrive. The legal profession is a complicated realm, with its unstated norms and Byzantine power structures. Few junior lawyers can navigate that terrain on their own.
In the current legal era, it’s rare to meet a lawyer who has stayed at the same firm for her entire career. Which means that junior associates will often arrive to work one day only to find out that their mentor is leaving. Just like that, the working relationship is over.
But it doesn’t have to be. What follows are three stories about junior associates who faced that exact predicament and, in the end, chose to follow their mentors:
This story is from our Fall 2018 Issue.
Photography by Ian Patterson, hair and makeup by Shawna Lee and Michelle Calleja