Why Mentoring Through mentoring skills of technical competence

Why Mentoring? • Through mentoring, skills of technical competence and problem solving can be developed, and relate directly to the ideas of competence and mastery. • Through mentoring, skills of social awareness, empathy, relationship management, awareness of others, and teamwork can be developed and relate directly to the ideas of purpose, relatedness, and connectedness in motivation literature. • Through mentorship, the skills of self-awareness and selfmanagement can be developed, and all relate directly to the ideas of autonomy posited by researchers of motivation theory. • (Quinn 2005)

Why Mentoring and Why in Law? • • Recent empirical data have found that 21 percent of licensed, employed attorneys qualify as problem drinkers, 28% struggle with some level of depression and 19 percent demonstrate symptoms of anxiety. The study found that younger attorneys in the first 10 years of practice exhibit the highest incidence. A recently published study in the Journal of Addiction Medicine found that between 21% and 36% of attorneys drink at levels consistent with an alcohol use disorder. For comparison, those numbers are roughly 3 -5 times higher than the government estimates for alcohol use disorders in the general population. A research study from Johns Hopkins University found that lawyers experience three times the rate of clinical depression compared to professionals in 25 other occupations. Additional research demonstrates that approximately 15 percent of lawyers will encounter some form of depression during their careers—such as loss of appetite, lethargy, suicidal thoughts, or insomnia—at least three times a month during the past year. These troubling findings are not unique to licensed, employed, attorneys, but also extend to law students. “The results of at least one study suggest that law students report suffering from depression at a much higher rate than the general population, peaking during the third year at 40% of the law school population, while the general public hovers around 10%. ” (Sheldon and Krieger 2004).