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30 January 2023FeaturesInfluential Women in IPWilliam Peterson and Julie Goldemberg

Best practices for mentorship in IP

Both mentors and mentees stand to benefit from building strong and successful mentorship relationships, especially in the relatively small and specialised intellectual property legal sector where the norms and uniqueness of the field can create a steep learning curve.

While assigned mentors can be helpful for a new attorney who is trying to integrate into a practice, developing organic mentor relationships that provide for on the job learning opportunities is critical. Ideally, those relationships will allow both the mentor and the mentee to expand their networks by introducing each other to contacts in the close-knit field.

As a mentee, be passionate about the practice of learning. As a mentor, aim for intellectual equality and learning from each other. Foster an environment in which questions and ideas can be exchanged freely. By nature, lawyers have curious minds and when partnering with a mentor or mentee who brings a skillset different than (but just as applicable as) your own, leverage every opportunity to teach and learn from each other. For lawyers outside the IP space who collaborate with IP specialists, there is particular value given the diverse range of perspectives, including scientific, IP lawyers bring to bear.

“Younger attorneys often hesitate to reach out to partners with questions because they worry that the partners are busy and will not want to be bothered.” - William Peterson

Hybrid work scenarios can challenge a mentorship, but they don’t need to prevent it from succeeding. The key is communication and building a professional culture of collaboration, not competition, where mentorship is encouraged. Both mentor and mentee will benefit by giving each other credit; your success can be mutual.

Finally, if you have been fortunate enough to have benefitted from the guidance of strong mentors, pay it forward. Look for opportunities to share the skills, tricks, and tips you have learned with others, and help your mentees grow their networks and their practices. The intellectual property space is a close knit one. Your legal mentor or mentee may one day be your client or another legal decision maker in a position to help you, and whom you can serve, in another way, just as beneficial to you both.

The mentee: Julie Goldenberg

Will and our mentor-mentee relationship started organically, mostly out of necessity. We were asked to use our respective expertise—from Will, appellate proficiency, and from me, intellectual property and Federal Circuit knowledge—to assist in overturning the grant of a preliminary injunction in front of the court where I used to clerk.

We were successful, and we quickly teamed up again to leverage our technical backgrounds and work on other Federal Circuit and Supreme Court briefs. Since we were in frequent communication about our ongoing matters, we began to discuss other things about the matters we were handling individually, and before we knew it, our informal mentoring relationship began to crystallise.

I learned to trust Will’s judgment and gut instincts. He’s now the colleague I call when I need a sounding board or a ‘sanity check’. In part, I credit this level of comfort to his treatment of me as an equal. He once told me when I was a midlevel associate that we would spend the vast majority of our careers as peers and (hopefully) law firm partners. That meant a lot to me.

Will taught me the craft of appellate law. Before we began to collaborate, I had worked on Federal Circuit briefs, and as a former Federal Circuit law clerk, I had read a lot of good (and bad) briefs. But Will showed me just how much I had to learn about creating an appellate strategy from the outside, a process involving developing arguments, structuring briefs, error preservation, and rules of procedure. To him, calling yourself an appellate lawyer meant more than just being a lawyer who can write legal arguments: it’s a distinct mastery and mindset.

“It is hard because, due to hybrid work, I am no longer seeing everyone on a daily basis, which can present its own challenges to mentoring.” - Julie Goldemberg

He also demonstrated how to work with more junior attorneys, skills that I am now implementing more and more as a partner. It is hard because, due to hybrid work, I am no longer seeing everyone on a daily basis, which can present its own challenges to mentoring. I have learned that no matter what medium you use, being in frequent contact, brainstorming, and exchanging ideas can help build strong relationships.

I am also doing my best to pass on the technical teachings I learned from Will to associates I work with.  I often begin sentences with, “Will Peterson taught me in this situation we should . . .”  I regularly relay the advice he gave me about how to structure a brief and how to think about legal issues. I hope my mentees are benefiting from the guidance as much as I did.

It also helps to have a mentor (and a law firm) that recognises that the mentee’s success reflects on the mentor as well. Our firm is focused on recognising and rewarding lawyers who help others succeed, building a culture that reduces competition among colleagues and creates a collaborative environment that nurtures mentor-mentee relationships.

The mentor: Will Peterson

I remain grateful to my mentors who taught me how to practise appellate law, and I was glad to be able to pass on those teachings to Julie (who is now an excellent first-chair appellate lawyer in her own right).

Two qualities, in particular, made Julie a great mentee. The first was her passion: she was dedicated to becoming a great lawyer and was eager to learn. The second was her fearlessness: even as a midlevel associate, she never hesitated to challenge my ideas. She forced me—even more than I already did—to be conscious and thoughtful about my practice, to be able to explain why I made the decisions and changes I did. Mentoring programmes tend to focus on the benefits to the mentee, but as the mentor I can confidently say that I (and the clients I served) reaped enormous benefits from serving as Julie’s mentor.

As my mentors taught me, an appellate practice works best in an atmosphere of intellectual equality. Every team member should feel free to brainstorm, give input, and critique the suggestions of others. A first-year lawyer is likely to be a far better proxy for a judge’s law clerk than I am.

Working with Julie made that environment easy to cultivate. When we started working together, I was new to working on intellectual property matters—she had real experience that I did not. Without a question, the briefs I wrote with Julie ended up stronger than they would have been without her contributions.

Teaching and mentoring may be more challenging when people are working remotely and are in the office less often, but it’s not impossible. Julie works in Philadelphia, and I work in Houston. I don’t think we even met in person for a year, and by then we were already a solid team because we were in contact almost daily.

Younger attorneys often hesitate to reach out to partners with questions because they worry that the partners are busy and will not want to be bothered. For me, nothing could be further from the truth. I always prefer getting questions, especially in the beginning of a working relationship, to ensure my teammates and I are on the same page. Asking questions creates efficiencies, not inefficiencies. Julie was never afraid to ping me with questions, and I asked her questions just as much. Back when we used phones more often than video platforms, I had her extension on speed dial.

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More on this story

Influential Women in IP
27 January 2022   January marks National Mentoring Month and comes at a time when such guidance and support has become vital in achieving a more diversified leadership in law.
Influential Women in IP
6 May 2020   The legal profession hasn’t traditionally been ahead of the curve on formal mentorship programmes, instead relying on a more informal, organic exchange of knowledge between senior lawyers and young starters. WIPR reports.