Mentoring can be a formal or informal process, last a brief time for a specific issue or be a lifetime relationship, lawyers may well be both a mentor and mentee at the same time, and it’s fine, perhaps even preferable, to have several mentors.

It may be one of the most important roles for lawyers, a way to pay forward the lessons and values of the profession. All those factors, and more, were covered at the April 23 CLE seminar, Mentoring Makes a Difference, sponsored by the Bar’s Standing Committee on Professionalism and the Henry Latimer Center for Professionalism.

U.S. Northern District Judge Mark Walker said mentoring was an ongoing endeavor for Senior U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Emmett Ripley Cox, who died in March.