Clerkship Placement Stats 2009 Forum

[FlightoftheEarls]

Since we seem to have forgotten, this is a thread about CLERKSHIPS. So to get things back on track, here are the proportions of clerks accounted for by schools in the various US News Tiers:

% / N / TIER
0.394 561 T14
0.298 424 T1
0.188 268 T2
0.076 108 T3
0.044 63 T4

so if i am top 1/4 at mich, what are the odds of getting a clerkship? preferably in new york, chicago, boston, or dc.

I think you'd have a fairly decent shot, but the process is reportedly somewhat unpredictable. Somebody asked a similar question in the Michigan 2012 thread and they said there are people up to around top 50% and maybe beyond that manage to land fairly decent clerkships if they are strategic enough about it. Those big markets will be harder to land if you're not in the top 10-15% I'd imagine, but I wouldn't be amazed if you had a pretty solid shot with those types of grades. I'd hit up that thread and see if somebody there with more experience than us 0Ls can throw information/advice your way.

As an aside, that weather debate was just stupid. We should all be ashamed of ourselves. That is all.

[FlightoftheEarls]

This is why I am going to have no social life in skool. I shall be study nerd

zOMG GUNNER!

[cornellbeez]

Thanks snot and flight. I guess I'll be more selective with my elective courses...to bring up the GPA.

[keg411]

WTF Seton Hall???? How are they ranked decently at anything?

[kurama20]

First, calm down. Second, know who you're talking to before you make an ass out of yourself. Third, take this to some thread where it has something to do with the topic at hand, if you want to continue acting like a child. Also, I was born in Connecticut, grew up in South Carolina, and moved to Michigan from the Bay Area. I have also lived in Miami, Houston, L.A.; Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Colorado. And my SO is from western New York State. I haven't just "been" to these places -- most of them I lived in for between a year and a decade. So yes, I know EXACTLY what the weather is like in all of them, and in particular relative to each other.

Who the hell said I was even talking to you? Who are you supposed to be the online forum police!

I love snotrocket.

You love a faceless online person on an internet forum with the user ID snot rocket .....

[cornellbeez]

Who the hell said I was even talking to you?

Uh, you quoted snotrocket and said

Are you illiterate dumbass?

etc. etc. I think the "direct quote" and response bit was a bit of a giveaway.

[Mr. Matlock]

Stop pulling numbers out of your ass. It gets quite cold in Michigan, but it is not even remotely "arctic tundra cold." It never gets close to the epic, skin peeling -50F cold of places like Minnesota, and it's not even as severe as Chicago or Buffalo, which get far more wind and snow despite being at about the same latitude. The average high from April through October is around 60F, and the average highs in the thirties only hit for three months out of the year.

Are you illiterate dumbass? Check out the temperature averages/ranges for Ann Arbor and Ithaca on the wiki links I posted. And why the hell would you be so stupid as to use temperature averages from the middle of the damn summer to prove your point? Of course it isn't as cold during the summer captain obvious. And obviously artic tundra cold was an exaggeration. You actuallly think saying that it doesn't reach -50 degrees in Michigan is helping prove that it doesn't get cold in Mich? Are you insane? 10 and 20 degrees is very very cold. Did you really just use "60 degree is the average high from April to Oct" to prove that it isn't extremely cold in Michigan? You are really only making it more obvious how cold it is in Ann Arbor.

What will happen to TLS when people run out of stupid shit to argue about? I bet it will resemble this Mr. Show sketch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfUv5t71_Xo

Nothing like a TLS knockout fight about the weather. So gentlemen... straight leg or boot cut jeans? Aaaaanndd.... GO!

[dresden doll]

This is supposed to be a useful thread with some great info. Stop derailing it, ffs.

[snotrocket]

WTF Seton Hall???? How are they ranked decently at anything?

They've always had an absurd percent of graduates working as "clerks," and it was a given that most of them had to be lower level state clerkships. The JDU line would be that the school has a racket to place recent graduates into short-term "traffic court" clerkships just long enough to fill out the employment survey. But yeah, even in placing federal clerks they seem to be up there with the big boys. Maybe they've just got some phenomenal pipeline to alums who are judges or something. I'm sure some would suggest they're just lying, but since US News is not using this data for anything (yet), it seems like they have little reason to bother. And it seems like an honest enough statistic compared with the overall. Who knows.

[Mr. Matlock]

This is supposed to be a useful thread with some great info. Stop derailing it, ffs.

Well your grace, an argument about the weather in the middle of it took me a bit by surprise. And ffs stop using little known acronyms that I need to look up on urban dictionary.

That is all.

[snotrocket]

WTF Seton Hall???? How are they ranked decently at anything?

FWIW, it's also possible that, like some other schools, they misunderstood the question asked and meant that 6% of their clerks were placed with federal judges, rather than 6% of graduates. Columbia did this -- reporting "95%" employed by federal judges. If Seton Hall made this error, then that would put their placement closer to 2.2% and about 7 clerks. That's still not a trivial number, but it would be down in the 50-80 range, more in line with their overall rank and reputation scores. Because the federal number is not conspicuously huge, we can't really say without guessing that they must have made this mistake. Most schools seem to have understood the question the way it was apparently intended, but it might have been badly worded, judging by the fact that ~20 couldn't figure it out.

[runninouttatime]

Snotrocket, nice job kicking off the thread. It's about time you wrestled it back under control. I too have lived all over the U.S., including MI, NY, TX, and CA, and the insane waste of time that has occupied the middle 60% of this thread til now was plain irritating. Personally, weather is such a tertiary factor for me, I can't believe people got that carried away...

Anyway, thanks for reclaiming the thread; now back to statistics: Do you know of any information available relating the age distribution among clerkships, in particular at the federal level. I can only imagine that "average" age will be roughly 3+ years above the ave. age of entering 1Ls, which is 24-25 at most schools. Still, as a non-trad, I'm curious as to the range of possibilities beyond the average.

[Olto]

I've heard from a very reliable source that there are judges that won't even look at an application outside of the Top 20. That is, in one case, they [the judge + clerks] have no idea if this one applicant was #1 in her class, law review EIC, etc. They literally did not look at the application to find any of that out.

[Joan Manuel Serrat]

I've heard from a very reliable source that there are judges that won't even look at an application outside of the Top 20. That is, in one case, they [the judge + clerks] have no idea if this one applicant was #1 in her class, law review EIC, etc. They literally did not look at the application to find any of that out.

everytime somebody say they have a "source" i get this violent desire to throw them inside a Steinway & Sons piano, shut the top on there head, and play an endless loop of very very vigorous Stravinsky. I think it may take two hour at most before that person is trained to poop the pant and bleed from his ear every time he get urge to say "i got a source."

you got a "source," bitch? Well, i got a piano. Yeah, that's right, clench you butt cheeks.

[runninouttatime]

...there are judges that won't even look at an application outside of the Top 20...

Not too surprising, I guess. And yet, the counterpoint would be that a Pepperdine (T2) grad is currently clerking SCOTUS. There are probably other comparable examples; that just happens to be one I know of personally.

[cornellbeez]

I have a useful question: why do Michigan and Virginia kick clerkship ass?

[Son of Cicero]

^Do you think more people will accept offers to your school if you keep making this observation?

[cornellbeez]

^Do you think more people will accept offers to your school if you keep making this observation?

Probably yes.

I'm happy though, because I really want a clerkship to ride out the "on-coming-irritablebowelsyndrome known as OCI.

[curiouser]

I have a useful question: why do Michigan and Virginia kick clerkship ass?

because even though these states/circuits (the 6th and 4th) are suck-tastic (would a more charitable turn of phrase be "not particularly desirable places to live?"), they:

(a) still have Art. III judges who need clerks and are more disposed to hire locally and
(b) don't have as much competition -- they aren't as densely packed with top law schools

[cornellbeez]

I have a useful question: why do Michigan and Virginia kick clerkship ass?

because even though these states/circuits (the 6th and 4th) are suck-tastic (would a more charitable turn of phrase be "not particularly desirable places to live?"), they:

(a) still have Art. III judges who need clerks and are more disposed to hire locally and
(b) don't have as much competition -- they aren't as densely packed with top law schools

Reasons why your theory sucks:
1) Most of our clerks don't work in the 6th circuit.
2) Why aren't the schools located in circuit 9 faring better? Circuit 9 is the largest circuit and has the most case flow. In other words, why are circuit 9 schools (except Stanford) doing so shitastically for clerkship placement?
3) Why would Chicago, which basically has no competition in circuit 7 assuming your theory is accurate, do worse than the schools ranked above it? (Don't tell me Chi students are all gunning for biglaw now. While NU and Chi are the only top schools in circuit 7, NU does not even count as clerkship competition.)

But yes, those are some reasons why your theory sucks.

[curiouser]

well, I'm not saying my theory explains all of the variance -- I'm saying it explains some.

1) Most of our clerks don't work in the 6th circuit.

I presume you're talking Michigan here. If so, I've seen your clerkship list, and I'm sure that between Michigan and CA6C that makes up for a good deal of the marginal difference in clerkship rates. "Most" is not the point here -- the point is to explain the variance.

2) Why aren't the schools located in circuit 9 faring better? Circuit 9 is the largest circuit and has the most case flow. In other words, why are circuit 9 schools (except Stanford) doing so shitastically for clerkship placement?

I think the 9th Circuit is a bit sui generis because of how the seats are divided (enormous number of states, large geographic area, ideological factionalization and anti-California sentiment), the utter glut of law schools in California, and I think it would be a mistake to look solely at Cal and Stanford with two just-outside T14 schools (USC, UCLA) sitting there, not to mention a bunch of other pretty good ones (e.g., Hastings)

3) Why would Chicago, which basically has no competition in circuit 7 assuming your theory is accurate, do worse than the schools ranked above it? (Don't tell me Chi students are all gunning for biglaw now. While NU and Chi are the only top schools in circuit 7, NU does not even count as clerkship competition.)

That's a good question. I would say, offhand, that it's daft to think that NU doesn't count as competition (because if nothing else they want it so badly that they promise the Dean will make calls on your behalf). The Seventh Circuit is relatively small (fewer judges than either Fourth or Sixth) and also allocates its clerkships differently (each judge sacrifices at least one clerk to a staff pool, and those posts, I think, are far less geographically sensitive). I think, of course, the fact that people would much rather travel to live in Chicago (as with NYC and SF) vs. anywhere in CA6C or CA4C has something to do with it.

Also, frankly, I'd care to bet Chicago grads are bad interviewers. Just a baseless hypothesis.

[snotrocket]

Anyway, thanks for reclaiming the thread; now back to statistics: Do you know of any information available relating the age distribution among clerkships, in particular at the federal level. I can only imagine that "average" age will be roughly 3+ years above the ave. age of entering 1Ls, which is 24-25 at most schools. Still, as a non-trad, I'm curious as to the range of possibilities beyond the average.

If you have the grades, get on law review, etc., then I've never seen anything to suggest that age is a factor. Judges only need their clerks to live for one or two years at the most, after all. Age seems to be less of a factor in legal hiring all around than you would think. Generally people do not get shut out of anything based on age alone, although sometimes your own priorities (family, retirement, relocation . . . ) may cause you to avoid making choices that younger people will.

[snotrocket]

I have a useful question: why do Michigan and Virginia kick clerkship ass?

I think there are some obvious eyeball correlations between the stats in the OP and these:

--LinkRemoved--

So it's not just an M-V thing, and probably not much of a regional phenomenon either. It seems more a legacy of what schools have somehow or another wound up producing more federal judges than others. Most of the schools conspicuous on that list seem to wind up near the top here as well.

[Olto]

I've heard from a very reliable source that there are judges that won't even look at an application outside of the Top 20. That is, in one case, they [the judge + clerks] have no idea if this one applicant was #1 in her class, law review EIC, etc. They literally did not look at the application to find any of that out.

everytime somebody say they have a "source" i get this violent desire to throw them inside a Steinway & Sons piano, shut the top on there head, and play an endless loop of very very vigorous Stravinsky. I think it may take two hour at most before that person is trained to poop the pant and bleed from his ear every time he get urge to say "i got a source."

you got a "source," bitch? Well, i got a piano. Yeah, that's right, clench you butt cheeks.

Just the fact that you A. thought of this; B. had time to type it out; C. would say something like this on the Internet to an anonymous person all indicate to me that you are likely a bit troubled.

"source" can mean any number of things. After the summer is over, PM me and I'll tell you who the source is (at least in relative terms). I'll give you a hint: it's not a Spaceballs like connection (father's brother's cousin's college roommate, etc.)

[snotrocket]

I've heard from a very reliable source that there are judges that won't even look at an application outside of the Top 20. That is, in one case, they [the judge + clerks] have no idea if this one applicant was #1 in her class, law review EIC, etc. They literally did not look at the application to find any of that out.

On the flip side, some judges will not look at anyone ranked outside the top 10% at any school. It all depends on the judge, and on their clerks. The clerks often do the first pass to reduce the pile, and the judge won't even see between 1/2 and 3/4 of them in many chambers.