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I recently struck out at 2L OCI (bad bidding and mediocre interviewing skills). I don't think my stats are bad considering people with lower grades were able to secure offers.

Does this leave me totally out of the running for a federal district court clerkship? Should I be spending my 2L summer doing some type of government internship or something public interest related?

I don't think most judges care where you spent your 2L summer, as long as you did something. I'm sure some judges are looking for biglaw, but there are plenty of judges out there who don't know about firm sizes/rankings and don't care. You should spend your 2L doing whatever gets you closest to the job you want to do after graduating.

Most judges won't care, so long as you do something legal your 2L summer, and can explain how it fits into your career goals. Plenty of clerks never worked for a Biglaw firm.

Above posters are right. But you should assess why you struck out because interviews are much more important in clerkship than BigLaw hiring

Struck out at OCI and landed district and circuit clerkships, so above posters are right.

No. I know two who struck out ended up getting 2nd Cir

ndirish2010 wrote:Struck out at OCI and landed district and circuit clerkships, so above posters are right.

What did you end up doing your 2L summer?

Anonymous User wrote:

ndirish2010 wrote:Struck out at OCI and landed district and circuit clerkships, so above posters are right.

What did you end up doing your 2L summer?

State AG. To be fair I landed circuit clerkship after working post district clerkship, and the circuit clerkship is for a very ideologically-specific judge. But still, it's more than possible.

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JusticeJackson wrote:I agree with the above posts that it's possible. I've seen it plenty of times. The fed coa judge I clerked for was oblivious to the names of big firms. Basically if a firm didn't have a local office in the 1980s, the judge hadn't heard of them. We had this conversation at least 3 times: "what was the [biglaw] firm you worked for again? . . . Oh, never heard of them."

Yep, I'm thinking my future CoA judge doesn't know many of the big firms either. It would shock me if any of his recent clerks were biglaw people.

I feel like the intersection of true OCI strikeouts and those who are grade & school qualified to have a reasonable shot at any AIII clerkship has to be a small group though.

flawschoolkid wrote:I feel like the intersection of true OCI strikeouts and those who are grade & school qualified to have a reasonable shot at any AIII clerkship has to be a small group though.

Maybe now. Didn't used to be though. I was top 10%ish/law review at ND. There were many others like me at T25/T30s in 2010 and 2011.

I struck out at 2L OCI, but I worked for a few years and ended up with FED COA. (Median from H)