By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The fall business retreat was a corporate office staple when I started my legal career in the waning years of the twentieth century. The formula was simple: beautiful setting + planning/pep talks = mission/fiscal success. It did not always quite work out just that way.
Three decades ago, I joined my Salt Lake City law firm as a new associate attorney. At age 25, I was green and rather clueless, but bursting with passion, enthusiasm, and confidence. I was ready to make my distinct mark on the practice of law.
I carefully selected a law firm I thought might help me fulfill such grand ambitions. The place had the right combination of skilled lawyers and fine clients, and the partners believed in hard work but with a bit of mischievous playfulness mixed in. Moreover, among other things, they did what I also really wanted to do—represent journalists in various aspects of news media law.
Six months after I started this exciting new job, all the lawyers headed to the newly-built Stein Eriksen Lodge in the high mountains of Deer Valley, Utah, for the firm’s annual retreat. There I discovered the meaning of rustic elegance—rooms of exposed rock and splintered wood beams but white linen, engraved notepads, and stemware on all the meeting room tables.
The meetings included many operational and strategic reports, which were interesting, enlightening, and encouraging. The firm president, a silver-haired giant of the local legal community, gently admonished us all to “do good work for good clients and get paid for it,” saying such was the secret to making the business a “gold mine.” I received a more ominous message, however, later in the evening, when the official meetings had ended.
It was firm tradition to host an after-dinner party in a spectacular suite on the final night of the retreat. There, the Stein Eriksen staff dutifully dished out delicious hors d’oeuvres and poured ample shots of fine Kentucky bourbon. Perhaps emboldened by too little of the former and too much of the latter, a senior partner cornered me and mumbled, “You’ll never make it here.”
I was stunned, demoralized, and de-swaggered. I tried a humorous response, “You mean at the cocktail party? You’re right, I am a lightweight.” His glassy eyes glared at me, and then staggered around the room looking for another possible victim.
My good friend and colleague, who started at the firm on the same day as me, witnessed the verbal drive-by assault. He told me to ignore the comment and offered succor, saying, “It’s the bourbon talking.” It was good advice that proved very difficult to follow. The distilled words streamed through my blood vessels with their intended toxicity.
Fortunately, ugly autumn mentoring in a lovely alpine lodge was not a daily event and I enjoyed other more-positive moments at the firm. Two senior lawyers taught me employment law, my main line of work now, and trusted me with significant projects to hone my skills. Another lawyer, now a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sat quietly with me as we together mourned the sudden death of a mutual friend and colleague killed in a car accident. One other partner taught humanity by example when he adopted a number of special needs children from far-flung corners of the globe.
I also learned a good lesson in professional grace and dignity from a lawyer at the firm. He included me in every news media law project referred to him. One day it was clear I had unintentionally eclipsed him, as one media client started calling me instead of him. I felt disloyal and told him about it. He smiled sadly but said, “Keep that client here Mike, even if it means I never bill another minute to it.”
In the instant replay that reels through my mind, these many encouraging words sometimes are overshadowed by the slurred prognostication of my future failure to “make it.” It is personal proof, I suppose, of the old adage that one negative word can speak more loudly than ten positive.
Most of us who have been mentored eventually get to return the favor, albeit with someone else. This opportunity presents the choice to either perpetrate or transcend the acts of those who trespass against us. My brush with bourbon-based mentoring has been most helpful here.
Mentors should consider the good advice from the Gospel of Luke: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” A mentor’s job is to teach and encourage. Sometimes, we do it with words of praise; other times with a realistic assessment and a candid, but constructive, evaluation of how to do something better. The job description, however, does not ever include demolition.
Thirty-plus years after my first Stein Eriksen retreat, I still work at the same law firm. I am starting to hope that I just might make it there. My bourbon-drinking friend is long gone (may he rest in peace). Although my total time with the firm now exceeds his, I still can hear his whiskey-laced words.
I am working on that whole forgive-and-forget thing with, obviously, mixed results. I do not deny, however, that I owe him a few words of thanks. Whether intended or not, he motivated me to prove him wrong. He also taught me how not to impose a similar burden of proof on anyone else.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.
