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I'm not sure if this question has been asked before, but when someone clerks as an alumnus, say 3 years out, does this clerkship ever make it onto their school's placement data? I only thought of this because I was looking at 2013 numbers and realized that a few people from my class are clerking for the first time this term, so would never be included in those numbers.

I think the cut-off for counting is 9-month following graduation date.

Ah, okay, so basically alumni clerks never get counted. I could see the problem with double counting, but it also shows that clerkship numbers provided by schools are at least somewhat under-representing how many people actually clerk.

The Columbia clerkship office tries to collect data on students who clerk 1-3 years out. The numbers are quite interesting (far more alumni clerks than immediate ones, which makes sense given the increasing emphasis on work experience). I think Harvard does the same. For example, there's a number floating out there that over 500 HLS students clerked in a federal chambers (incl magistrates) over the past three years; that includes alumni and it's basically double their recorded 9mo clerkship rate. This data isn't publicly available, though, and it's one of the flaws in reading too much into ABA/LST year on year numbers.

jbagelboy wrote:The Columbia clerkship office tries to collect data on students who clerk 1-3 years out. The numbers are quite interesting (far more alumni clerks than immediate ones, which makes sense given the increasing emphasis on work experience). I think Harvard does the same. For example, there's a number floating out there that over 500 HLS students clerked in a federal chambers (incl magistrates) over the past three years; that includes alumni and it's basically double their recorded 9mo clerkship rate. This data isn't publicly available, though, and it's one of the flaws in reading too much into ABA/LST year on year numbers.

Oh that's really interesting. I figured the numbers would be higher but that is a ton for HLS. I guess it makes since they don't make it on the same employment report as everyone else, since that would be a lot of double counting, but it would be great if there were more available stats on this.

jbagelboy wrote:The Columbia clerkship office tries to collect data on students who clerk 1-3 years out. The numbers are quite interesting (far more alumni clerks than immediate ones, which makes sense given the increasing emphasis on work experience). I think Harvard does the same. For example, there's a number floating out there that over 500 HLS students clerked in a federal chambers (incl magistrates) over the past three years; that includes alumni and it's basically double their recorded 9mo clerkship rate. This data isn't publicly available, though, and it's one of the flaws in reading too much into ABA/LST year on year numbers.

Interesting that there are far more alumni clerks than immediate in Columbia's dataset. For Harvard, the split is close to 50/50 in recent years.

To the point about counting alumni, if you take the HLS C/O 2013 for example, about 100 reported 2013 clerkships, which were included in the ABA data. The ABA/LST number is 17.8%. But about 50 also had 2014 clerkships. It looks like about 3/4 were double clerks, so add another 15 there. About 30 of the C/O 2013 also reported 2015 clerkships, and it looks like about 1/4 of the 2015 cohort were counted in the ABA/LST number. So add about 20 there. When you crunch the numbers, 17.8% of the C/O 2013 clerked in 2013, about 20% of the C/O 2013 clerked in either '13 or '14, and about 24% of the class clerked sometime between '13-'15. Some of the C/O 2013 have clerkships for 2016 or later, but the numbers tail off significantly after 3 years out.

So if you crunch the numbers for this one [unrepresentative] cohort, then the ABA survey undercounted the number of fed. clerks by about one-third (24-17.8/17..

LST's scoring is even more problematic because it excludes SSC clerks (which I think most of us would agree are highly desirable jobs). Once you add those, the number of preftigious clerkships for this one class is about 27%. So the LST percentage is off by about 50%.