How I Learned About Mentorship by Being “Exiled” to the Library

I learned what a “third place” was long before I knew the term. At the time, it didn’t feel like a lesson. It felt like a demotion.

When I was practising law at the City of Toronto, space was at a premium. New hires were placed wherever a desk could be found

As a junior lawyer, it was only a matter of time until a more senior hire bumped me out of my office.

But I wasn’t expecting to be reassigned to a desk in the law department library.

To add literal injury to insult, this happened just after I’d sprained an ankle. I remember sitting at my new desk, no door or walls to hide my awkwardly propped up leg, feeling exposed, sidelined, and a bit bitter about my circumstances. Okay, let’s be honest: a lot bitter.

Offices matter in law. They signal belonging, status, and legitimacy. Losing mine felt like losing more than square footage. I was acutely aware that I had been displaced from what looked, and felt, like the real centre of work.

What I didn’t expect was how much that desk in the library would reshape my experience of practice.

Because of where I was sitting, people stopped. Lawyers from departments I rarely interacted with struck up conversations. They asked what I was working on, shared what they were dealing with, compared notes on process problems and institutional pressures.

One kind person lent me a pillow she usually kept in her office to make my elevated leg more comfortable.

I began to learn things from my fellow City lawyers in a way I previously hadn’t, including how much legal work turns on soft knowledge and skills rather than formal doctrine.

And then there were the librarians. Watching them work was a quiet education. They didn’t simply retrieve sources. They helped lawyers articulate half‑formed questions, redirected research paths before they became dead ends, and supplied context that made doctrine usable.

In retrospect, what they were offering looked very much like mentorship—just without a formal program. At the time, I wouldn’t have called any of this mentorship. But that’s exactly what it was.

The Third Space: Neither Firm nor Elsewhere

That library wasn’t a courthouse library; it was a law department library. But what mattered wasn’t the label. It was the function.

The library occupied an in‑between space, one embedded in practice, yet offering opportunities to slow down, voice tentative questions, and learn informally from one another in ways that formal workplaces rarely make possible.

Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third space.” He identified public places that are neither work nor home—cafes, parks, public libraries, or community centers—but are essential for building community, fostering social connection, and reducing loneliness.

Looking back, it strikes me that the law library functioned like a third place for legal practice, and how beneficial these spaces are.

Mentorship Needs Space Before It Needs Structure

Much of the current conversation about mentorship in law focuses on formal programs with assigned mentors, scheduled check‑ins, and tie-ins to professional development plans.

These are valuable!

But they assume a baseline level of institutional support that many lawyers simply do not have, especially the sole practitioners and small firms that make up the majority of courthouse library users.

Mentorship can be just as valuable, arguably more so, when it is a natural, voluntary, and unstructured relationship. For all that law is an adversarial profession, lawyers are generally collegial, and many seasoned practitioners are happy to offer guidance to those coming up behind them.

This type of mentorship grows organically, often evolving from professional admiration or friendship without formal matchmaking or strict timelines. And it needs a place to take seed.

Without space, learning is pushed into formal channels that are necessarily limited and, often, inaccessible to those outside larger institutional settings.

How Courthouse Libraries Help

This is where courthouse libraries play a particularly important role.

Courthouse libraries are often used most heavily by solo practitioners and lawyers in small firms—precisely the segment of the profession least likely to have access to formal mentorship structures. These lawyers do not have practice group meetings, in‑house training sessions, or a steady supply of colleagues down the hall to consult.

For them, the courthouse library is not an auxiliary service. It is part of the learning environment of practice.

These libraries function as third places not just socially, but professionally. They are shared spaces where isolation is softened, and where learning happens collaboratively rather than competitively.

In a profession that leaves fewer places for the informal learning that is crucial to the administration of justice, courthouse libraries quietly continue to make room.