Path toward becoming clinical professor/lecturer? Forum

[Anonymous User]

I'm a rising 3L at a T14 with a strong resume - top of my class, exec board on a secondary journal, very involved in school, and summered at a well-regarded biglaw firm.


I liked my firm over the summer, but I know that I don't want to live the biglaw lifestyle more than 4-5 years. I don't see myself becoming a partner, and I'm going into litigation so I don't know how realistic in-house counsel is. I really love law school and think I would thrive working in this environment, but I don't see myself as a tenure-track professor. I know what that path requires and I just don't have a strong enough passion for research to put in the years of work.


But my school has a ton of clinical and legal writing faculty who seem really happy with their careers. I don't know any details about compensation, but I know many of the faculty have managed to buy homes. I'm also just very attracted to both the work and the lifestyle: I love the idea of working with students, as well as the stable schedule.


Do any of you have any insight on how to pursue a career like this? I didn't apply for clerkships but I'm open to it. It seems like a lot of these people just worked as lawyers for a while and then applied for law school jobs. Is that a feasible path?

[Anonymous User]

Most clinical roles require 5 years of practice minimum. Occasionally, you'll find one with only 3 years required, but candidates with just 3 years of experience are pretty rare. That's not meant to discourage you. That's just meant to motivate you to plan accordingly. Maybe your career looks like 3 years in biglaw litigation and then 4 years doing PI before transitioning over. For demonstrated interest purposes, you might also want to consider leaving biglaw at some point to do some clinical fellowships (Georgetown has several) where you'll get paid $70-80k and might even get an LLM out of it. At all times, you'll also want to network by cold emailing clinical faculty in your city and anywhere you'd like to work to ask to get coffee or zoom.

As for compensation, it's typically not very good (on a relative basis). Most clinical faculty (on both the legal writing and actual clinical side) are not tenure-track. As a general rule of thumb, those that are tenure-track are paid more than those who aren't. For the 80% or so that do not enjoy tenure-track status, many enjoy ABA 405(c) "tenure," which means at some point you get pretty long presumably renewable contracts. ABA 405(c) tenure is great in the sense that you have fantastic job stability, but your pay does not align with tenure-track faculty pay. It's very common for legal writing faculty to make $60k-$80k starting and cap out around $100-120k. I have a spreadsheet with about 75 entries and only 12 entries are above $120k and UNLV/UCI account for have of them. Though, my data is probably a couple of years old now, so you can probably bump that number up to $125k or $130k. You'll find some places that pay more (sometimes a fair amount more, like UCI), but they're rare and probably one of the few places that give actual tenure to their legal writing faculty (though, pay sucks at some of those places too). For legal writing, the U.S. News specialty ranking is actually pretty good in terms of helping you find law schools that treat those faculty well. All of the top 10 schools either provide actual tenure, very good pay, or both. As for clinical faculty that actually teach clinics, I'd say they are much more likely to start at $80-100k and go up to $150k. As with legal writing professors, you'll find some places that pay more there too. Clinical faculty that actually teach in clinics are more likely to have real tenure-track positions at good law schools, as opposed to legal writing tenure-track positions that are generally at pretty bad law schools.

Regardless of if you do legal writing or teach in an actual clinic, you'll be a second class citizen without actual tenure. You should ask yourself if you're okay with that before entering the world of clinical teaching.

[Anonymous User]

This post ^ sounds way more informed than mine will be, but I was interested in academia for a bit so I have kind of paid attention to this a little. The big thing for being a clinical/legal writing prof (unlike the tenure-track kind) is to get enough practice experience that you can actually teach students how to practice. Apologies if this sounds super obvious, but one thing you can do is just go to schools' websites and look up all the faculty in this category and see what their backgrounds are. Anecdotally, while schools do hire nationally, you are likely to see quite a few alumni and local practitioners as well. There are two people I overlapped with in law school who currently work as profs there - one directs a clinic related to the government job they did for 9 years, and the other did an LLM in a fairly niche area (they had some related experience before law school) and went straight from that to this clinic (which I think actually they helped get off the ground). I agree with the post above though that the latter person, who had little practice experience, is much more unusual.

You will need to think about what experience you can get and what kind of clinic/courses you would be qualified to offer. Keep in mind that, at least to my knowledge, there aren't a lot of clinics focused on the kind of litigation that biglaw firms do - they tend to be more public sector/public interest-focused, in part because they're essentially offering student volunteers to the community (I've definitely seen entrepreneurial law clinics, but those seem to focus on more transactional work than litigation). Like common areas for clinics are criminal law, juvenile law, immigration law, housing law, social security, that kind of thing. I'm not saying people with biglaw experience can't get these jobs, just that lot of the people who have biglaw backgrounds appear to have moved into something more specialized/public-interest-y before going to teach a clinic, so you will need to keep that in mind.

The salary info above is really good. State universities usually need to make their salaries public, so you could look up some state schools yourself (though it can take a little digging to find the details you need). Keep in mind that not all clinic/legal writing jobs are full time, and again anecdotally, I've definitely seen people teach legal-writing part-time on top of their day jobs for a couple of years before getting a full-time position.

And the point about being a second-class citizen is really important. Clinical/legal writing faculty, because they often don't have tenure, are also often not part of campus governance in the way that t-t faculty are, which contributes to there being two tiers. And since publication is the coin of the realm for t-t profs, they tend to look down on non-publishing folks. Ideally, a good academic community will make everyone feel valued, but so little is actually ideal. Now, you may just not care about the money or what the doctrinal faculty think - if you like working with students, especially on stuff that's actually real/practical, you may find the job satisfying enough that you can just kind of laugh at t-t prof drama. But it's a dynamic to be aware of.

The other thing you should do now (meaning during 3L, not this exact minute) is just go talk to the clinic/writing profs at your school and ask them how they got their jobs. People generally love to give advice, especially when they get to talk about themselves.

[Anonymous User]

The second class citizen issue is real; and, while you may believe that you will not care what the doctrinal faculty think, no one enjoys being looked down upon and being treated poorly. (My wife was actually on the tenure track for 3 years before the toxicity caused her to leave.)

Law professors recognize that the legal community doesn't think much of 99.9% of them, so most law professor won't let pass an opportunity to let non-tenure track faculty know that they don't think much of them.

Keep in mind what Secretary of State & former Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger said, "University politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low."

[Phillygirl19004]

Good info above, just adding to clarify that legal writing is not-tenure-track model at any of the T14 schools. No one really knows what Yale does, although it is not a traditional LW program. Harvard and Chicago do a two year path-to-legal academia fellowship -- Climenko at HLS and Bigelow at Chicago -- which is a fixed term position during which fellows do their academic research/publish/interview for tenure-track jobs, all while teaching legal writing. NYU is a 3 year Lawyering program job, up and out after the term ends. Columbia uses adjuncts who teach one section and have a full time career outside the law school. U Penn, Michigan, Duke, Cornell, Northwestern and Georgetown have longer term contracts but not tenure track. Off-hand, I can't recall what U VA and Berkeley have.

[Anonymous User]

The second class citizen issue is real; and, while you may believe that you will not care what the doctrinal faculty think, no one enjoys being looked down upon and being treated poorly. (My wife was actually on the tenure track for 3 years before the toxicity caused her to leave.)

Law professors recognize that the legal community doesn't think much of 99.9% of them, so most law professor won't let pass an opportunity to let non-tenure track faculty know that they don't think much of them.

Keep in mind what Secretary of State & former Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger said, "University politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low."

I'm the anon who said that someone might not care, and I don't mean to minimize the problem of the two-tier system. I just think it can vary by institution. I know that many of the clinic/LW profs at my law school (not a T14) had been there for quite a while (and are still there), so while I can't claim that as a student, I had full insight into their experience, it's clearly worth it to them to stick around. (I do have experience in academia outside of law school so I'm familiar with the issues/dynamic more generally.) And given that most clinical profs get hired for their practice experience, they probably have other options open to them.

Some schools are definitely just toxic in an unfortunate academia-specific way. After all, if your wife was on the tenure track and left due to the toxicity, that toxicity wasn't limited to treatment of non-TT faculty - if people are that committed to hierarchy and asserting their place in it, it's a miserable culture for TT profs, too; the non-TT just have it that much worse.

I do think clinical/LW jobs can be good gigs, but it depends on the individual and institution. It depends on how much enjoyment/satisfaction that person gets out of the job and if those things outweigh the second-class citizen status - for some people they never will (which is totally fair), for others it depends on a variety of things (also fair).

But yeah, higher ed (including law schools) can be among the most toxic workplaces ever, the second class citizen thing is real, and someone thinking about academia needs to go into it with their eyes open.