Law Clerk Addict answering questions Forum

[lawclerkaddict]

You may have seen my site, http://lawclerkaddict2009.blogspot.com/. I've posted here a couple of times, but I thought I'd take questions you may have about compiling the data, what the data show, and so forth.

[doyleoil]

i've seen your threads in other places, but i'll go ahead and ask a few things that i think you might have answered somewhere else (by the way, the site is really useful...we refer to it all the time around here):

at the end of the day, what percentage of appellate clerks do you think your data accounts for? do you know for sure what percentage? what "blind spots" do you think your methodology has, if any?

how much of the 2009 picture is left to fill in? do you think the final picture will be pretty close (in terms of schools' positions relative to each other) to the chart you have now?

[lawclerkaddict]

i've seen your threads in other places, but i'll go ahead and ask a few things that i think you might have answered somewhere else (by the way, the site is really useful...we refer to it all the time around here):

at the end of the day, what percentage of appellate clerks do you think your data accounts for? do you know for sure what percentage? what "blind spots" do you think your methodology has, if any?

how much of the 2009 picture is left to fill in? do you think the final picture will be pretty close (in terms of schools' positions relative to each other) to the chart you have now?

I'd say that I'm getting over 50% at this point. In the future, I hope to use the judicial yellow book to back-fill some of the data. But my data only collects term clerks, which means that plenty of gaps are filled by a judge having one or two career clerks. I don't have a definitive percentage. But there are about 250 appellate judges, so I've got an average of about 2 clerks apiece. And, given that some have only 3 clerks, most senior judges have only 2, and some are inactive or only have career clerks, it's a pretty good amount.

"Blind spots" come from schools whose students just don't report clerks, either because they don't read the blog or because they don't care to do so. I've e-mailed a fair number of career services in the top tier, so underreporting probably comes from a clerk or two coming from various lower-tier schools. But, the site has been featured on Leiter, WSJ, Above the Law, Tax Prof, and Volokh; and various schools have linked to the blog on their own career sites, like UVA, Texas, GWU, and W&L. So it's definitely had wide notice.

Most of 2009 is in, as you can see. Virtually all active judges have at least one clerk accounted for. (The Federal Circuit tends to be an outlier.) I imagine that it won't change much overall, but an influx of data from a specific school could bump that school up a fair amount.

[D-ROCCA]

Thanks for taking questions. Can you comment on the hiring market for lawyers about to finish their clerkship, especially federal clerkships? Do know how the percentage of clerks who go on to firms compared to gov't jobs? Are they much more desirable than recent grads for Biglaw or prestigious gov't positions like DOJ?
Sorry if these are dumb questions, I just don't know much about job prospects after a clerkship.

[270910]

Thanks for taking questions. Can you comment on the hiring market for lawyers about to finish their clerkship, especially federal clerkships? Do know how the percentage of clerks who go on to firms compared to gov't jobs? Are they much more desirable than recent grads for Biglaw or prestigious gov't positions like DOJ?
Sorry if these are dumb questions, I just don't know much about job prospects after a clerkship.

This thread is like 17 months old. Way to necromancer.

[D-ROCCA]

Necromancer is a noun. And ya, I f'd up-I miss the regular search function.