Young Lawyers: Nobody Is Going to Build It for You
For your entire life up to this point, someone has structured your development for you. School had a curriculum. University had a degree plan. PLT had modules and assessments. You worked hard — nobody is taking that away from you — but the scaffolding was always there.
Then you started practising. And the scaffolding vanished.
There’s no curriculum for becoming a good lawyer. No module on how to handle the partner who gives unclear instructions, or how to manage the anxiety of advising on something you’ve never seen before. The firm will give you work and deadlines. It won’t hand you a roadmap for how to grow.
Nobody warned me about this either. And it cost me.
My Regret
I should be honest. I did have some good mentors. Pervaiz Buttar and Wajiha Ahmed in particular shaped how I think about practice, and I’m grateful for that. And beyond them, I learned an enormous amount just by listening — to the countless judges, lawyers, barristers, and registrars I interacted with over the years. You absorb more than you realise when you pay attention.
But that’s the point. Imagine how much more I would have absorbed if I’d been intentional about it. If I’d actively sought out more of those relationships instead of letting them happen by accident. If I’d picked up the phone and asked for a coffee instead of hoping I’d learn enough by osmosis.
One of my biggest regrets isn’t that I had no mentors. It’s that I didn’t lean into mentoring hard enough, early enough. I told myself I was too busy. That I’d figure it out on my own. That reaching out to more people would look like I couldn’t handle it. Wrong on all three counts.
Why No One Told You
Law school teaches you to think. Your firm teaches you to produce. Neither teaches you how to develop as a practitioner. That’s not your fault. It’s a gap in how the profession is set up.
Most firms don’t have structured mentoring. The ones that do often treat it as box-ticking. The Law Society of NSW runs a formal program and even they say the mentee is “responsible for driving the relationship, setting the agenda and arranging the meetings.” That’s not because they’re lazy. It’s because mentoring doesn’t work any other way.
Senior lawyers aren’t withholding guidance. They’re drowning in their own work. They’ll give you time if you ask. But they won’t come looking for you. They assume you’re fine.
I assumed I was fine too. I wasn’t.
The Voice in Your Head
Here’s what happens when you don’t have a sounding board. The negative self-talk moves in.
You make a mistake on a draft and the voice says: you’re not cut out for this. You get sharp feedback from a partner and the voice says: they think you’re useless. You watch a colleague handle something confidently that you’d struggle with and the voice says: everyone else gets it except you. Left unchecked, those thoughts compound. They become the lens through which you see every interaction, every piece of feedback, every late night.
A mentor is a circuit breaker. Not a therapist — a sounding board. Someone who can hear you say “I don’t think I’m good enough for this” and respond with “I felt exactly the same way in my third year. Here’s what was actually going on.” That one conversation can dismantle weeks of spiralling. Not because the mentor has magic answers, but because they’ve been where you are and they know the voice is lying.
Without that sounding board, you’re alone with the voice. And the voice is relentless.
What Mentoring Actually Gives You
Mentoring isn’t vague. It gives you frameworks you can’t get from doing the work alone.
Jason Feng at Practising Law describes the moment a mentor taught him about ‘managing up’ — proactively anticipating the needs of the person you’re working for. Before that, he’d assumed the last-minute instructions and late nights were just part of the job. His mentor showed him they didn’t have to be. As Feng puts it: “the people you work for went to law school — not management school.”
That’s a practical insight that changes how you work every day. And he didn’t get it from a textbook. He got it from a mentor.
Mentoring teaches you the things between the law and the practice of law. How to read a room. How to manage expectations before they become demands. How to stop being a doer and start being a thinker. These aren’t skills you develop by working harder. They’re skills someone has to show you.
Inside and Outside the Firm
Your first mentors are probably already in your building. But when someone assigns your work and reviews your drafts, the relationship feels transactional. Task in, feedback out.
Change the dynamic. One sentence does it: “I’m working through this and I’d really value your perspective. Could we grab ten minutes?” When you proactively suggest timelines and clarify deliverables instead of waiting for instructions, you show you’re thinking, not just executing. That’s what turns a supervisor into a mentor.
But don’t stop at the firm. The barristers you brief see matters from a completely different angle. Lawyers at other firms solve the same problems differently. Retired practitioners have hindsight. Law society events and CPD seminars aren’t just networking — they’re mentoring opportunities, if you approach them with that intent. Networking is collecting contacts. Mentoring is building a relationship because you asked.
I should have had a mentor at the bar. I should have had one who’d left private practice entirely. I never asked. Not because I didn’t want to. Because it never occurred to me that I could.
Mentoring vs Sponsorship
Justice Dina Yehia of the NSW Supreme Court recently drew a distinction I wish I’d understood earlier. Mentoring is guidance. Sponsorship is something else — a sponsor puts their name behind you, recommends you for opportunities, opens doors you didn’t know existed.
You can’t manufacture sponsorship. But it grows out of a mentoring relationship where you’ve shown you take the work seriously and act on advice. None of that starts without the first conversation.
Three Things You Can Do Today
First, pick a senior lawyer in your firm or a barrister you’ve worked with and ask them for a thirty-minute coffee. Keep it simple: “I’d really value the chance to learn from your experience. Would you be open to a coffee sometime this week?” One message. You’ll be surprised how many say yes.
Second, register for the next Law Society event, CPD seminar, or bar association function in your area. Go with one intention: have a real conversation with one person more senior than you. Ask them what they wish they’d known at your stage. Then listen.
Third, write down three questions about your career that you can’t answer on your own. Not legal questions — career questions. Things like: how do I know if I’m developing fast enough, or if I’m just getting comfortable? Is this the right practice area for me, or am I staying because it’s familiar? How do other lawyers handle the weight of this job without letting it take over their lives? Those are the questions a mentor helps you work through. And until you’ve sat with them honestly, you won’t know what to ask for.
Start Today
The system should do this for you. It doesn’t. But the lawyers who figure that out early are the ones who develop faster, burn out less, and build careers that actually sustain them.