What matters for post-grad apps? Forum

[Anonymous User]

School/grades/journal are still going to matter but are judges a little more to flex on traditional criteria if someone has a couple years of experience?

Does the firm someone worked at start matter? The specific work they did? Who is expected to write LOR?

Also - are circuit judges less willing to look at someone who is applying out of practice?

[Anonymous User]

School/grades/journal are still going to matter but are judges a little more to flex on traditional criteria if someone has a couple years of experience?

Does the firm someone worked at start matter? The specific work they did? Who is expected to write LOR?

Also - are circuit judges less willing to look at someone who is applying out of practice?

School, grades, and journal still matter but somewhat less so the longer you've been out. The firm someone worked at can matter. The specific work you did is unlikely to matter just because it's hard to discern if someone had genuinely significant work experience at a firm, because everyone does good-faith puffery on their resume and in interviews. A law firm partner can write a LOR but a professor from LS is still probably ideal if possible. I would say that circuit judges are less inclined to value work experience than district judges, but I don't think that means they won't look at you if you're applying out of practice. It just means that they won't be impressed by your work experience, unless you worked in a well known appellate practice of a firm or something like that.

[Anonymous User]

I agree with the above, except that I wanted to add 1) for most judges, what firm you’re at really won’t matter (I guess I agree that it *can* theoretically matter, but I suspect I think it matters less than the above anon does, and to the extent it does, it isn’t because “oooh, it’s a V5” but “oh, they work with my former clerk Joe Schmoe”) and

2) I think what work you’ve done can matter (I know about puffery but if you haven’t done anything relevant to the clerkship I don’t think you can even puff it up effectively; or to put it another way, I think someone with good relevant experience is better positioned to sell themselves in an interview than someone who doesn’t have that even despite puffery. That is, I think interviews can actually evaluate what you have/haven’t done, in a way that isn’t clear from OCI interviews because at OCI no one has done anything). That said, I don’t think you need to have actually done a lot of important stuff yourself to get the kind of understanding of the litigation process that will help for clerking, so I agree it can be marginal. Having only done transactional won’t help you though (it won’t necessarily prevent you from clerking because some people have pulled that off, but it won’t help you).

[jdoeman1234567]

School/grades/journal are still going to matter but are judges a little more to flex on traditional criteria if someone has a couple years of experience?

Does the firm someone worked at start matter? The specific work they did? Who is expected to write LOR?

Also - are circuit judges less willing to look at someone who is applying out of practice?

The real reason why judges “flex” on traditional criteria for people with work experience is simply because there are far fewer people with work experience and strong credentials who still want to clerk 2+ years out of school. So if a judge only hires people with work experience, then the judge is massively narrowing the applicant pool. This is because many of the top students do still clerk right out of school and a lot of people who may have applied in school no longer want to clerk after working for a couple years.

I would not say that circuit judges are “less willing” to look at someone with work experience it’s just that most appellate judges don’t actually prefer work experience so you are still competing with the full applicant pool. A notable amount of district court judges essentially require work experience.

[Anonymous User]

I can't imagine any Circuit judges would look down upon ~1-4 years of work experience. I did hear from someone that Judge Jerry Smith (5th Cir.) only hires people straight out of law school for some reason but I have to imagine that those types of situations are few and far between.