Mentor-mentee relationships in any professional environment come with pre-designed expectations. Mentees want a network to tap into as they grow in their fields, and mentors want someone who will respect them and their time, as well as someone they can confidently direct towards success. Having a legal mentorship agreement template in place that both parties can sign eliminates any gray areas separate from these already established expectations and guarantees that your relationship-like any other employee-customer relationship-is as fruitful as possible. The legal essentials of a mentorship agreement in Florida carry over into any civil litigation case, and any written document that fails to hold these essentials can actually hurt rather than help the mentor/mentee relationship. It is the lawyer’s job when writing any contract to ensure that both parties will be held to all promises made within the template. This is how hiring a law firm can benefit you.

While it is certainly possible to find a do-it-yourself mentorship agreement template online, these documents are often full of potential loopholes and ambiguities that make them unusable in a court of law later on. For this reason, the smartest move you can make when creating a mentorship agreement template is to hire an attorney to review or draft the document for you. Civil litigation in Florida is about maintaining relationships and knowing how to save yourself legally when those relationships go awry, and this is no different in the context of a mentee/mentor relationship. By hiring an attorney or law firm like Burlington & Rockenbach, P.A., you can better hold both parties accountable to their contractual obligations.

While it’s not a guarantee of anything, the legal mentorship agreement template that we would urge you to develop will establish key elements of essential legality, including: Every mentorship agreement template should include language around who the mentor and mentee are, where the relationship will take place, the particulars of mentorship (including how much the mentor will charge if applicable), how much notice each party has to give for terminating the relationship, how often you expect contact from both parties, easing to find the right mentor or mentee, and whether an entity employs or contracts with them. While there are various ways in which we can address this in the language of the document, we recommend being as simple and clear as possible by asking the mentee to list 3-5 specific goals of the professional relationship. Some areas of focus may include the mentee’s promotion at work, future education opportunities, and networking connections. Then, make sure the mentor agrees to the same.

By requiring a mentorship agreement template for your professional relationship, you ensure that both parties will have an accurate depiction of what is going on between the two of you and because you trusted an attorney or law firm like Burlington & Rockenbach, P.A. to draft the template, you know that it is legally sound. In doing this, you are protecting yourself against litigation in the future because the document clearly explains the intentions of both parties. Keep your mentor-mentee relationship on the professional track by working with reputable lawyers to have all agreements in writing.

For more information on legal agreements, you can visit Nolo’s guide on mentorship agreements.