About the Mentor Externship Program

Program Overview	Curriculum	Our Mentors
Reflective Lawyering	Professionalism

Program Overview

The Mentor Externship Program is one of the most distinctive and innovative components of the School of Law, focusing both on students’ understanding the profession’s minimum standards and the development of each student’s moral compass to achieve our profession’s highest ideals and healthy peer collegia.  The program has earned two national awards, the E. Smythe Gambrell Award for Professionalism (American Bar Association, August, 2005), and Innovation and Excellence in Teaching Professionalism (The Conference of Chief Justices and the American Bar Association Professionalism Committee, Honorable Mention, April, 2005).

In each year of law study, every student is paired with respected lawyers and judges in the community.  Mentors introduce students to a wide range of lawyering tasks and judicial activities and share with them the traditions, ideals, and skills necessary for a successful career. 
 
At the start of the year, each student is required to consult with his or her mentor and prepare an individualized plan, identifying what the student would like to accomplish in the mentor relationship. The plan   focuses on the three primary program objectives: 

1. To foster the highest levels of professionalism for students and mentors;
2. To provide students with both an experiential window through which to view professional obligations in the real world and exposure to the diverse spectrum of work of lawyers and judges;
3. To create opportunities for students to engage in conversations with mentors, full- and part-time faculty, and peers about professionalism, the practice of law, and what they are observing and learning through their mentor experience.  

Consistent with the three program objectives, the plan has three parts:

First, the student must write a personal ethics mission.  Each student is asked to focus on an aspirational standard of professionalism in writing his or her ethics mission. The student provides a copy of the personal ethics mission to his or her mentor.   

Second, the student (with the assistance of his or her mentor) is required to identify a minimum of two lawyering or judicial experiences he or she would like to do or see during the year with the mentor. Through this hands-on interaction with the bench and bar, students can draw on the skills of a more senior member of the profession to better prepare for life as a lawyer.  The engagement provides a “real world” framework for each student to test his or her understanding and expectations of lawyering skills and professionalism in a way the traditional classroom or lecture cannot capture.

Third, the student and mentor are required to outline two or more agreed upon “topics,” and to discuss those topics during the year.   The discussions stem from three general categories:  1. an experience the student participated in or observed; 2. a template provided; or 3. a topic suggested by the mentor or the student. 

Quality Control

The objectives of the Mentor Externship Program are continually evaluated, and assessment tools are used to guide the supervision and administration of the externship with a focus on the highest level of quality control. The primary methods of assessment include:

• Individual goal plans (Personal and Professional Development Plans);
• Contact with each student/mentor pair mid-year;
• Anecdotal reports from students and mentors;
• Required electronic record keeping (student mentor logs) with administrative supervision and feedback;
• Interaction with mentor externship faculty members
• Year-end evaluations and feedback from students, mentors and faculty.

At the end of each year, all student on-line mentor logs are compiled for evaluation, assessment and review. Particular emphasis is given to:

• Whether the externship objectives are being met, including an evaluation of professionalism issues; and
• Whether students are actively engaged in their mentor relationships.

Curriculum

Second- and third-year students are required to enroll in the credit-earning seminar and will earn one academic credit per year, for a total of two credits during his or her legal education. Adjunct faculty, following thorough training, assist in teaching the seminar component. Each class is limited to no more than sixteen students per section. Among other things, each student is required to attend eight class sessions, complete a minimum of twenty-four hours of fieldwork, complete all journal and reading assignments, and participate in class discussion.

Students and mentors are provided with guidance on experiences that earn credit in the program. A suggested list of credit earning experiences is provided to both students and mentors. The minimum number of experiences required for successful completion (four in the first year, five in the second and third year) must be diverse, or distinct, in nature in order to earn credit. What was once a list of 18 approved experiences is now a list of over 170 approved experiences representing the diversity of practice areas and legal opportunities. The guided student activities in the externship intentionally correlate with the law school curriculum in each year of law school. The list of experiences will continue to grow, and the program will continue to work with mentors to identify unique ways to allow a student to understand the work of a lawyer or judge.

 Over three dozen templates have been developed for students and mentors to facilitate and guide conversation about a given topic. Each template presents a list of questions that the student can ask of the mentor, or the student and mentor can discuss more collaboratively. The goal is to develop a complete series of templates consistent with the curriculum and the approved experiences. In addition, other templates will be developed to address issues of great importance to the profession, but not necessarily identified by course title or subject matter. For example, record keeping and billing practices, healthy balance, chemical dependency and addiction issues, bias in the profession, Catholic social thought, collegiality, networking/marketing and several other templates have been created to facilitate student-mentor discussion.

Mentor Externship also requires each student to develop a Personal and Professional Development Plan (PPDP) outlining specific, identifiable and achievable goals for the externship built on a platform of self-awareness and a student’s first principles. Each student is also required to write a personal ethics mission and share it with his or her mentor, the plan in completed during the first six weeks of the school year and helps guide the remainder of the year.

Our Mentors  

As members of a self-governing profession, lawyers and judges are called to assist in the training and preparation of our next generation of lawyers. Our mentors respond to that calling.

Over 500 lawyers and judges currently volunteer as mentors in the program. Mentors reflect the diversity of the profession in all its forms including age, gender, ethnicity, practice area, geographic location and religion. Mentors also represent all sectors of the profession: private practice (solo to large firm), local, state and federal government, non-profit and public interest organizations, in-house, public defenders, and the judiciary, including state and federal district courts, the appellate courts, specialty courts and Administrative Law Judges.

Each mentor is asked to contribute a minimum of 10 to 15 hours a year to the program. Many mentors voluntarily contribute more than 15 hours a year. 
 
This one-of-a-kind community of students, mentors, and faculty, informed by faith and reason, both presents a credible and realistic view of our profession and fosters a commitment to the ideals of the profession. Students develop a profound understanding of "real world" issues and a keen awareness that the success and health of the profession rest in the hands of the next generation of lawyers. This program prepares students for service and leadership.

Just as internal leadership support is critical to the success of the program, so is external servant leadership. Servant leadership is a philosophy that allows every individual to realize his or her full professional potential and personal growth in an ethical and caring environment. A critical piece of the St. Thomas program is training law students to be servant leaders who exemplify the highest ideals of our profession. Mentors, serving as role models, should themselves be servant leaders who exemplify these qualities.

Reflective Lawyering

The opportunity to fully appreciate and understand professionalism issues is further enhanced through the concept of reflective lawyering. The objectives of the program draw on the habit and skill of reflective lawyering. Working in concert with the hands-on application and required framework of the program, reflective lawyering is a key aspect of the Mentor Externship. The classroom discussions further the objective of reflective lawyering, a concept centered around the idea that students benefit from hearing both about other mentors’ approaches to the same issues, and about other students’ perceptions of what they have experienced. 
 

Professionalism

The understanding of professionalism on which the Mentor Externship Program is built flows out of the tradition of the learned professions in general and the Preamble to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct in particular. In the tradition of the learned professions, society and the members of a profession form an unwritten social compact whereby the members of the profession agree to restrain self-interest, to promote the ideals of the profession (particularly public service) and to maintain high standards of minimum performance, while society in return allows the profession substantial autonomy to regulate itself through peer review.

To maintain the social compact and its autonomy, a profession must create peer cultures both of effective maintenance of minimum standards and of high aspiration in terms of professional ideals. Healthy peer cultures depend on the life-long formation of the moral compass of each professional and ethical leadership from within the peer collegia that fosters both effective peer review and high aspiration.

Professionalism and ethics have always been central themes for the program. However, the School of Law did not anticipate the extent to which the program would: (1) identify professionalism issues in terms of communication, record-keeping and meeting deadlines, (2) provide an opportunity to educate students about those issues, and (3) better prepare them for life as a professional. Working with a lawyer or judge in the community requires students to focus on a number of professionalism skill sets that are not necessary for or tested in the classroom. Students are called to navigate these issues, in a very objective sense, just as lawyers and judges do on a daily basis. Functioning at the aspirational level, the program allows students to navigate difficult issues along side a servant leader who exemplifies the highest standards and aspirations.

What has emerged since the programs inceptions is a portrait of professionalism challenges for students that mirror professionalism challenges for lawyers. The parallels are striking, and call for innovative and effective effort not only to identify personal weaknesses and future ethical challenges but also to move students to the highest level of ethical and professional behavior for the betterment of our profession and the communities we serve.