By Tom Jarvis
The New Hampshire Bar Association will bring attorneys, judges, educators, and other members of the legal community together on November 6 at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law for “Counsel for the Future: Building a Foundation for Practice Readiness,” a symposium focused on mentorship and preparing the next generation of lawyers for legal practice.
The program is a major initiative of NHBA President Robert Lucic, who says the idea grew out of several overlapping concerns about legal education, technology, mentorship, and the transition from law school to practice.
“Law school teaches a very specific way of analyzing problems, but it doesn’t really teach you how to practice law in the real sense,” Lucic says.
He points to managing the business side of law practice, having difficult conversations with clients, managing expectations, and navigating cases when things go badly as skills that are often developed through experience rather than classroom instruction.
“We want young lawyers to learn how to become not just technicians but counselors, trusted advisers,” he says. “Part of that is experiential and part of that is watching other people, actually learning the skills of how to have difficult communications with people.”
Lucic says the symposium grew in part from discussions surrounding the NHBA’s Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence, and from a report by the national Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform (CLEAR).
In August 2023, the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators established CLEAR as a working committee on legal education and admissions reform. New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald served as chair of the committee during its initial work. Its report called for state supreme courts and other stakeholders to modernize legal education and bar admissions, improve practice readiness before and after attorneys enter the profession, and expand experiential learning opportunities.
The report also highlighted concerns about mentorship. Chief Justice MacDonald told the New Hampshire Bar News last year that remote practice has made some of those traditional mentoring opportunities more difficult.
Lucic says the symposium is intended to make that kind of professional development more deliberate.
Breakout sessions are expected to be a central part of the program, with participants working through practical scenarios and discussing how to become more effective mentors and mentees.
“The breakout sessions are designed to be practical, hands-on, interactive programs where people can discuss best practices for how to become a good mentor,” Lucic says.
He says the sessions are also intended to address how to ask the right questions, give difficult feedback, and learn from the approaches other attorneys would take in similar situations.
“The idea is to have an interactive session, to have the ability for everybody to exchange ideas, and to have our facilitators work through some scenarios with people,” he says.
Additional speakers and program details are still being finalized.
The symposium will also address the growing role of artificial intelligence in legal practice and the implications it may have for training newer attorneys.
Lucic says AI-generated work can make it more difficult for supervising attorneys to determine whether a newer lawyer truly understands the legal reasoning behind the work. In some cases, he says, traditional methods of assigning and reviewing legal writing may need to be supplemented with more direct questioning.
“You have to put the computer down, sit down with me, and explain to me in your own words what this means,” Lucic says.
At the same time, he says the profession must teach attorneys to use AI effectively and critically rather than simply avoid it.
“We’re going to have to teach people how to write prompts and how to critically analyze the output because it looks all very shiny and nice when it gets spit out,” he says. “It may look right, but you’ve got to do the homework.”
That exchange of knowledge is also central to Lucic’s view of mentorship. He says experienced lawyers can offer perspective on judgment, client relationships, professional expectations, and difficult situations, while newer attorneys may be better positioned to help more experienced lawyers understand emerging technology.
“Younger lawyers can also teach older lawyers like me not to be scared of the technology,” he says. “It’s a tool.”
Lucic says November 6 is not intended to be the end of the discussion.
“I really hope that this is not a one-off, that this is really a start of a dialogue that needs to happen,” he says.
Participants will have work to do before the symposium and follow-up commitments afterward, he says, with practice readiness and mentorship expected to remain part of discussions at future NHBA events, including the Midyear Meeting, Annual Meeting, and Bench-Bar Conference.
“This is just the start,” Lucic says. “We will not be done in a day.”
For Lucic, the broader goal is to make mentorship a more intentional part of professional life rather than something that happens only when time permits or when a younger lawyer happens to find the right person.
“This is the future of our profession,” he says. “Everybody has had the benefit of having learned from or been taught by people along the way. Every one of us who has made it to a certain level in this profession has had the help of others, and it’s our job to continue to do that.”
That responsibility, he says, has to remain a priority even amid the demands of day-to-day practice.
“We need to make it a focus of our practice, not just ‘Oh, I’ll get to it if I have time,’” he says.