Ivan K. Fong: Mentoring By Example
If not for the advice of his mentors, Ivan K. Fong might have seen the inside of a courtroom only to contest a traffic ticket. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering. But the right relationships with the right professors placed him on the path to an impressive legal career, which was guided every step of the way by positive influences. Fong spoke with Diversity & the Bar® and shared his advice on how mentoring can help both those working to make it in the legal industry, and those who already have.
Ivan K. Fong’s résumé and list of achievements reads like that of any successful legal superstar. There are the clerkships with some of the legends of the bench (Judge Abner J. Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor). There are the educational achievements, including a stint as president of the Stanford Law Review, a Fulbright scholarship, and a Phi Beta Kappa key. And finally, there are the corporate triumphs, the latest of which has seen Fong take the reins as the chief legal officer of the Vendor Financial Services unit of GE Commercial Finance.
What is not on his résumé, but is just as important, are the mentors whose positive influence and guidance made these achievements possible. Fong is quick to give credit for his success to the people who encouraged him along the way.
“One great example of this is how I ended up at Oxford,” Fong conveys from his office in Danbury, Conn. In his second year of law school, Fong learned that the federal appellate judge he had so painstakingly arranged a clerkship with upon graduation had suddenly decided to retire. “I was feeling sorry for myself and unsure what to do next, and the judge was apologetic, so I went to commiserate with a partner at the law firm where I was a summer associate at the time,” he says. “The partner picked up the phone and called another judge, Abner Mikva, who said he had already lined up his clerks for the year after I had graduated, but that he would be happy to interview me for a clerkship the following year.”
Score one for a helpful mentor, in the form of the partner supervising a summer law clerk, a partner who took the time to assist the young student and give him a phenomenal stepping stone (a partner who would later wind up serving as a judge on the DC Circuit). Further good advice came from another mentor, who went the extra distance by helping to figure out a way for the young law student to spend his suddenly empty post-graduate year.
“When I went back to school for my third year, I asked several of my professors and a lot of other people what I should do with this time that was suddenly unaccounted for,” Fong relates. “I knew I wanted to do something interesting, and the best advice I got was from a professor who said that once you’re in practice, the one thing you will have less of an opportunity to do is travel and study abroad,” says Fong. The professor then went to his Rolodex and pulled out the business card of a colleague who taught at Oxford. That contact led Fong to a Fulbright scholarship and a year of post-graduate law studies at Oxford.
Fong’s biography is peppered with stories like this, and these experiences have led him to a very pronounced belief in the nature of mentoring and the opportunities and obligations incumbent on all. The first rule for people seeking advice: It never hurts to ask.
“People are happy to provide advice at the right time and place, and people are flattered when you ask them for career guidance,” says Fong. While he admits that, for him, “a lot of career changes I have had arose because of serendipitous events,” Fong still believes that these coincidences don’t happen entirely by accident.
The second thing Fong says young attorneys and law students looking for advice should do is to identify their mentors. “Identify people you respect and admire, and seek them out,” Fong advises. “When others ask me ‘Where should I work? Whom should I get my assignments from?’ I tell them, ‘Assess the people in the organization and find those you most respect and admire and can learn from, and go to work for them. Try to judge whether someone is not just a world-class lawyer, but someone who will take the time to teach you and invest in you.'”
This advice leads to a third point: Technical ability is never enough to move up in any organization. A lawyer has to be reasonably likeable as well, and be able to get noticed without being obnoxious. “Doing outstanding work should be a given,” says Fong. “That’s your entry ticket, and it’s what people assume you are doing if you want to advance your career. But style matters too, whether we acknowledge it or not. People like to associate with people who have a personable style, are interesting to talk with, and are up on what’s going on in the world.”
Fong’s own personal style lends itself to casual and informal mentoring relationships that create the sort of atmosphere where everyone can think laterally about their networks and the opportunities within them. “I have seen people come up through formal networking and mentoring programs and those can help,” says Fong, “but, really, the most valuable and meaningful relationships are the ones where two people have just organically gotten together and taken the initiative.”
For those who seek the time and advice of others, Fong cautions that mentoring is a two-way street, and that the mentee should also try to provide something of value to the mentor, whether in the form of exceptional work, volunteer work for a bar association or other organization in which the mentor is active, or sometimes simply the intangible “reflected glory” of having assisted a rising star. The cyclical nature of mentoring leads to his most important piece of advice to everyone, first-year associates to partners: “Keep your eyes open. Many times we are not paying attention to opportunities or to what our own hearts are saying about things. It is very important to be aware of who you are and where the world is going, so that when opportunity comes, you will recognize it.”
 | Ivan K. Fong, senior vice president and general counsel of Vendor Financial Services—a unit of GE Commercial Finance—shared his thoughts with Lloyd M. Johnson, Jr., the founder of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, and publisher emeritus of Diversity & the Bar® magazine. This is the third of six articles that will be written this year on the topic of mentoring across differences—spotlighting how lawyers of different racial, gender, and cultural backgrounds build successful mentoring relationships. Lloyd M. Johnson, Jr. is currently the vice president of national sales at Areté Legal in San Francisco, Calif. He can be reached by email at ljohnson@aretelegal.com. |
From the May/June 2005 issue of Diversity & The Bar®