Fed Clerkship: how much does school matter? Forum

[furrrman]

Obviously HYS does exceedingly well in this area, so lets leave them aside. How about the others? Does the "prestige" of the school matter much? For instance, is there a tangible difference between Emory (6.4%) and Northwestern (6.4%)? Or Texas (8.3%) and Columbia (7.9%)?

If my goal after LS is to get a fed clerkship, should I simply go to the school I get into that has the highest placement percentage? Or should I believe its more about the individual and their abilities, and if one can get a clerkship from school A they can also get one from school B?

Sorry if any of this is naive, or oversimplistic. I honestly know nothing about the process. Thanks.

[Tiago Splitter]

If your goal is to get a federal clerkship you need to really think about a Plan B. Fed Clerkship numbers might justify paying more for HYS over other T-14's but if HYS aren't on your radar the fed clerkship percentages everywhere else are too low to make any difference in how you approach your law school decision.

[mi-chan17]

Current federal clerk here.

Yes, the school you go to matters for clerkship purposes. Not precisely the preftige/USNWR way, though. It's not that the tangible difference between Northwestern and Texas is number of clerks. The difference is where they're clerking and who they're clerking for. Judges are idiosyncratic in their hiring. They do tend to take from the "top" schools - and HYS in particular - but which "top" schools they end up pulling from ends up being a matter of their individual opinions on each school. Some judges have soft spots for their alma mater, though it might be ranked 17th or something instead of 13th. Some judges like to save a spot for two for the valedictorian of the local law school (not a random example; I've heard of at least two judges that do this). So strict rankings really isn't the way to look at the clerkship hiring process.

ALL OF THAT SAID, I would never select a school based on the likelihood of clerking. Getting hired to clerk is uncommon enough that it's not worth (in my opinion) factoring into why you selected a school. I'd pick a law school where you're okay with the non-clerking hiring options available at median and at graduation. Then, if you end up with grades good enough to clerk, you can apply and hope for the best.

[A. Nony Mouse]

^ This. Judges care about school, but not in a way that you can really quantify or predict. It's more that once you're at a school, that will probably affect which judges are likely to be interested/where you're likely to be competitive. But it's not generally grounds for going to one school over another, except at the extremes (e.g. HYS, and you can be lower in the class at a T14 and still have a shot at clerking than if you're at a TT, that kind of thing).

[84651846190]

At the risk of drawing arbitrary lines and looking like a fool, I think there are three tiers of schools for clerking at a federal COA or district court:

Tier 1: HYS. Generally speaking, you have a shot at COA clerkships if you're in the top 1/3 and district court clerkships if you're in the top half (or even lower in some cases).

Tier 2: T14. Top 10% for a shot at a COA and top 25% for a district court.

Tier 3: Everyone else. You generally need to be at the top (or very near the top) of your class for either COA or district court clerkships. Judges define this differently, and they may dip lower for their alma mater, but I'd say very few people outside of the top 10% at non-T14 schools have a solid chance at landing any kind of fed district or COA clerkship.

There are always exceptions, but you shouldn't count on being an exception unless you have something very unique going for you.

[bearsfan23]

At the risk of drawing arbitrary lines and looking like a fool, I think there are three tiers of schools for clerking at a federal COA or district court:

Tier 1: HYS. Generally speaking, you have a shot at COA clerkships if you're in the top 1/3 and district court clerkships if you're in the top half (or even lower in some cases).

Tier 2: T14. Top 10% for a shot at a COA and top 25% for a district court.

Tier 3: Everyone else. You generally need to be at the top (or very near the top) of your class for either COA or district court clerkships. Judges define this differently, and they may dip lower for their alma mater, but I'd say very few people outside of the top 10% at non-T14 schools have a solid chance at landing any kind of fed district or COA clerkship.

There are always exceptions, but you shouldn't count on being an exception unless you have something very unique going for you.

Serious question: Why do people group HYS together for clerkships? Is it because a lot of Harvard people are trying to play up their school or something. For clerkships its Y----------S--------H---C/rest of the top schools.

The only schools where fed clerkships are a legitimate option for non-top tier students are Yale and Stanford. Saying Harvard is at that level is just giving bad advice

[84651846190]

At the risk of drawing arbitrary lines and looking like a fool, I think there are three tiers of schools for clerking at a federal COA or district court:

Tier 1: HYS. Generally speaking, you have a shot at COA clerkships if you're in the top 1/3 and district court clerkships if you're in the top half (or even lower in some cases).

Tier 2: T14. Top 10% for a shot at a COA and top 25% for a district court.

Tier 3: Everyone else. You generally need to be at the top (or very near the top) of your class for either COA or district court clerkships. Judges define this differently, and they may dip lower for their alma mater, but I'd say very few people outside of the top 10% at non-T14 schools have a solid chance at landing any kind of fed district or COA clerkship.

There are always exceptions, but you shouldn't count on being an exception unless you have something very unique going for you.

Serious question: Why do people group HYS together for clerkships? Is it because a lot of Harvard people are trying to play up their school or something. For clerkships its Y----------S--------H---C/rest of the top schools.

The only schools where fed clerkships are a legitimate option for non-top tier students are Yale and Stanford. Saying Harvard is at that level is just giving bad advice

I know multiple people around median from HLS who landed federal district/COA clerkships. I agree that Y>S>H, but the drop off from H is huge.

[iamgeorgebush]

maybe

b/c HLS kids tend to go to nyc more than any other state

and nyc has a lot of transax m&a and capital markets work

and clerkships are not v useful for this type of work

HLS kids tend not to seek clerkships as often as SLS kids, half of whom go to california, where there's proportionately more litigation.

of course i don't know whether there's actually proportionately more lit in california...but i suspect there is...cuz prop 65 and torts and such.

maybe...

[jbagelboy]

maybe

b/c HLS kids tend to go to nyc more than any other state

and nyc has a lot of transax m&a and capital markets work

and clerkships are not v useful for this type of work

HLS kids tend not to seek clerkships as often as SLS kids, half of whom go to california, where there's proportionately more litigation.

of course i don't know whether there's actually proportionately more lit in california...but i suspect there is...cuz prop 65 and torts and such.

maybe...

Would say the same for CC. If you're on law review and you want a clerkship you can get one. Most people just don't care to try because they are going corporate, and the even w/ clerkship boost, you lose $50-60K overall.

Harvard would be closer to Stanford/Yale if its class size wasn't 3x as big. Not a fair comparison when speaking of very limited number of slots

[iamgeorgebush]

maybe

b/c HLS kids tend to go to nyc more than any other state

and nyc has a lot of transax m&a and capital markets work

and clerkships are not v useful for this type of work

HLS kids tend not to seek clerkships as often as SLS kids, half of whom go to california, where there's proportionately more litigation.

of course i don't know whether there's actually proportionately more lit in california...but i suspect there is...cuz prop 65 and torts and such.

maybe...

Would say the same for CC. If you're on law review and you want a clerkship you can get one. Most people just don't care to try because they are going corporate, and the even w/ clerkship boost, you lose $50-60K overall.

Harvard would be closer to Stanford/Yale if its class size wasn't 3x as big. Not a fair comparison when speaking of very limited number of slots

word

[timmyd]

It's not as simple as HYS, t14, then everyone else. Vandy and UT both place similarly to lower t14 in terms of Fed Clerkship.

[twenty]

Kind of tangential, but does one's chance of getting a federal clerkship increase 2-3 years after graduation (assuming the person was doing reasonably prestigious legal work?)

[A. Nony Mouse]

Yes, in that there are judges who prefer to hire only people with some post-grad legal work experience. (They don't generally seem to care what that experience is, either, although I generally only hear of people with firm or prior clerkship experience doing this.) There are also judges who prefer only to hire new grads, but I think there are fewer of the latter than the former.

(When the plan was still alive, alum candidates also had the advantage of being able to apply whenever, and not have to fight to be noticed in the flood of on-plan applicants. Now that doesn't apply any more, but alums have the benefit of having a longer track record to point to.)

[Person1111]

100+ people (i.e. 17-18% of the class or more) in virtually every graduating class at HLS clerk. I know plenty of people who got federal clerkships with median or even worse grades. I'm sure that Y and S are no worse than HLS, but HLS's clerkship placement is much closer to those schools than it is to CCN or anywhere else.

[Tiago Splitter]

I'm sure that Y and S are no worse than HLS, but HLS's clerkship placement is much closer to those schools than it is to CCN or anywhere else.

Class of 2012 clerkship placement:

Yale: 34.6%
Stanford: 28%
Harvard: 17.8%
Chicago: 14.4%
Virginia: 14.3%
Duke: 12.9%

[beepboopbeep]

I'm sure that Y and S are no worse than HLS, but HLS's clerkship placement is much closer to those schools than it is to CCN or anywhere else.

Class of 2012 clerkship placement:

Yale: 34.6%
Stanford: 28%
Harvard: 17.8%
Chicago: 14.4%
Virginia: 14.3%
Duke: 12.9%

TBF 2012 was a bit of a positive outlier for UofC. Going by the school-reported numbers for fed clerkships:

2012: 15.02%
2011: 9.59%
2010: 12.53%
2009: 8.32%

Though these are only the numbers for people who got clerkships within 9 months of graduation; if you expand that to the total number of clerks from a class, the numbers change to:

2012: 22.32%
2011: 20.2%
2010: 26.15%
2009: 16.01%

Obviously older classes have had more time to obtain alum clerkships, so one would expect the 2012 number in particular to continue rising. It's also obviously not worth comparing these to 9mo numbers at other schools without running the same calculations for those as well.

Something I've always been interested in working out is, comparatively, which schools place more in CoA vs. DC; obviously it's not a perfect proxy for quality/preftige/whatever, but still could be valuable. I don't really feel like running these numbers for other schools (since I don't attend them), but for UofC:

2012: 54.16% of fed clerkships are CoA
2011: 70.73%
2010: 62%
2009: 63.63%

I think this can help put into perspective comparisons between schools with vastly different USNWR/ATL/whatever rankings but similar fed clerk rates. You'd expect the quality to be better at one over the other, but who knows. It may also not really be worth calculating outside of t14 because the numbers are so small that one or two really exceptional students could have a big effect on a particular class.

edit: as for the OP, deciding on school based on clerkship % is... not a good idea. You have no idea what your grades are going to look like, and outside of HYS you've got to do pretty darn well to be competitive (though even at UofC you hear of people outpunching their GPA).

[84651846190]

I'm sure that Y and S are no worse than HLS, but HLS's clerkship placement is much closer to those schools than it is to CCN or anywhere else.

Class of 2012 clerkship placement:

Yale: 34.6%
Stanford: 28%
Harvard: 17.8%
Chicago: 14.4%
Virginia: 14.3%
Duke: 12.9%

Outlier years for Virginia and Chicago on the high end and an unusually low number for HLS. HLS was consistently above 20% a few years ago and UVA/UChicago are usually around 10-12% IIRC.

[Tiago Splitter]

Harvard's fed clerkship placement was between 16% and 18% for each of 2009-2012. Definitely better than the ~10% you see at other T-14's but way behind Yale and Stanford, and closer to the next T-14 than it is to either Y or S.

[84651846190]

Harvard's fed clerkship placement was between 16% and 18% for each of 2009-2012. Definitely better than the ~10% you see at other T-14's but way behind Yale and Stanford, and closer to the next T-14 than it is to either Y or S.

I was looking at the overall clerkship numbers, not federal. http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/care ... -data.html

My bad.

I don't know why so few HLS grads get fed clerkships. The whole "they have a bigger class size" argument just doesn't make sense to me. Who cares about class size? If the relative prestige of HLS is the same as SLS, both schools should have the exact same proportion of students going into fed clerkships (assuming the same proportion of students wanted said clerkships). I can only assume it comes down to self-selection or something like that.

Anecdotes are anecdotes, but I know several HLS grads with no honors who landed fed clerkships (as seen by looking at their resumes for lateral interviews). That puts them right around median at best. I don't know *any* T10 grads around median who have gotten fed district and COA clerkships. None. And from what I've seen on this site, the GPAs listed by career services offices at schools like UVA show that median students really don't stand much of a chance at all for landing fed clerkships.

[sapien]

Harvard's fed clerkship placement was between 16% and 18% for each of 2009-2012. Definitely better than the ~10% you see at other T-14's but way behind Yale and Stanford, and closer to the next T-14 than it is to either Y or S.

I was looking at the overall clerkship numbers, not federal. http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/care ... -data.html

My bad.

I don't know why so few HLS grads get fed clerkships. The whole "they have a bigger class size" argument just doesn't make sense to me. Who cares about class size? If the relative prestige of HLS is the same as SLS, both schools should have the exact same proportion of students going into fed clerkships (assuming the same proportion of students wanted said clerkships). I can only assume it comes down to self-selection or something like that.

Anecdotes are anecdotes, but I know several HLS grads with no honors who landed fed clerkships (as seen by looking at their resumes for lateral interviews). That puts them right around median at best. I don't know *any* T10 grads around median who have gotten fed district and COA clerkships. None. And from what I've seen on this site, the GPAs listed by career services offices at schools like UVA show that median students really don't stand much of a chance at all for landing fed clerkships.

I have heard from a few students at each school that the main reason that H does so much worse than S is indeed class size. It's just very hard to get to know professors and get them to care enough to call judges when you're at a school that's so big and has so many other talented students. A non-class size difference is that S has quarters so students can get to know more professors and increase their likelihood of getting a good recommendation.

[84651846190]

Harvard's fed clerkship placement was between 16% and 18% for each of 2009-2012. Definitely better than the ~10% you see at other T-14's but way behind Yale and Stanford, and closer to the next T-14 than it is to either Y or S.

I was looking at the overall clerkship numbers, not federal. http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/care ... -data.html

My bad.

I don't know why so few HLS grads get fed clerkships. The whole "they have a bigger class size" argument just doesn't make sense to me. Who cares about class size? If the relative prestige of HLS is the same as SLS, both schools should have the exact same proportion of students going into fed clerkships (assuming the same proportion of students wanted said clerkships). I can only assume it comes down to self-selection or something like that.

Anecdotes are anecdotes, but I know several HLS grads with no honors who landed fed clerkships (as seen by looking at their resumes for lateral interviews). That puts them right around median at best. I don't know *any* T10 grads around median who have gotten fed district and COA clerkships. None. And from what I've seen on this site, the GPAs listed by career services offices at schools like UVA show that median students really don't stand much of a chance at all for landing fed clerkships.

I have heard from a few students at each school that the main reason that H does so much worse than S is indeed class size. It's just very hard to get to know professors and get them to care enough to call judges when you're at a school that's so big and has so many other talented students. A non-class size difference is that S has quarters so students can get to know more professors and increase their likelihood of getting a good recommendation.

Good points, considering how pivotal recommendations are for landing certain clerkships. Maybe geography plays into it as well: Stanford is the top school in a gigantic state where everyone wants to go to Stanford and its only really competing with Berkeley. Harvard is one of two top schools in the Northeast where other good schools (NYU/Columbia/Penn) also compete for placement.

[jmkelly]

I think the big factor is that judges don't want too many people from the same school. Even assuming the quality distribution of candidates from is identical across HYS (which is generous to H at least relative to Y), lots of individual judges will still prefer not to hire three Hs for every Y or S.

[cotiger]

I'm sure that Y and S are no worse than HLS, but HLS's clerkship placement is much closer to those schools than it is to CCN or anywhere else.

Class of 2012 clerkship placement:

Yale: 34.6%
Stanford: 28%
Harvard: 17.8%
Chicago: 14.4%
Virginia: 14.3%
Duke: 12.9%

TBF 2012 was a bit of a positive outlier for UofC. Going by the school-reported numbers for fed clerkships:

2012: 15.02%
2011: 9.59%
2010: 12.53%
2009: 8.32%

Though these are only the numbers for people who got clerkships within 9 months of graduation; if you expand that to the total number of clerks from a class, the numbers change to:

2012: 22.32%
2011: 20.2%
2010: 26.15%
2009: 16.01%

Obviously older classes have had more time to obtain alum clerkships, so one would expect the 2012 number in particular to continue rising. It's also obviously not worth comparing these to 9mo numbers at other schools without running the same calculations for those as well.

Something I've always been interested in working out is, comparatively, which schools place more in CoA vs. DC; obviously it's not a perfect proxy for quality/preftige/whatever, but still could be valuable. I don't really feel like running these numbers for other schools (since I don't attend them), but for UofC:

2012: 54.16% of fed clerkships are CoA
2011: 70.73%
2010: 62%
2009: 63.63%

I think this can help put into perspective comparisons between schools with vastly different USNWR/ATL/whatever rankings but similar fed clerk rates. You'd expect the quality to be better at one over the other, but who knows. It may also not really be worth calculating outside of t14 because the numbers are so small that one or two really exceptional students could have a big effect on a particular class.

edit: as for the OP, deciding on school based on clerkship % is... not a good idea. You have no idea what your grades are going to look like, and outside of HYS you've got to do pretty darn well to be competitive (though even at UofC you hear of people outpunching their GPA).

Where are you getting these numbers?

[beepboopbeep]

TBF 2012 was a bit of a positive outlier for UofC. Going by the school-reported numbers for fed clerkships:

2012: 15.02%
2011: 9.59%
2010: 12.53%
2009: 8.32%

Though these are only the numbers for people who got clerkships within 9 months of graduation; if you expand that to the total number of clerks from a class, the numbers change to:

2012: 22.32%
2011: 20.2%
2010: 26.15%
2009: 16.01%

Obviously older classes have had more time to obtain alum clerkships, so one would expect the 2012 number in particular to continue rising. It's also obviously not worth comparing these to 9mo numbers at other schools without running the same calculations for those as well.

Something I've always been interested in working out is, comparatively, which schools place more in CoA vs. DC; obviously it's not a perfect proxy for quality/preftige/whatever, but still could be valuable. I don't really feel like running these numbers for other schools (since I don't attend them), but for UofC:

2012: 54.16% of fed clerkships are CoA
2011: 70.73%
2010: 62%
2009: 63.63%

I think this can help put into perspective comparisons between schools with vastly different USNWR/ATL/whatever rankings but similar fed clerk rates. You'd expect the quality to be better at one over the other, but who knows. It may also not really be worth calculating outside of t14 because the numbers are so small that one or two really exceptional students could have a big effect on a particular class.

Where are you getting these numbers?

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/students/ca ... clerkships and http://www.law.uchicago.edu/prospective/employmentdata, then some division. I presume other schools have at least some of this data online as well, though some might keep it accessible only to attending students. I know we have lists of who clerked for which judge (so presumably you could make a list of "feeders" and see how competitively we placed students at those particular judges), but it's gated on our OCS blackboard site.

edit: I should also add that the second set of numbers might be double-counting people who went from DC -> CoA. It probably is, in fact. The two pages also disagree in some spots.

[cotiger]

TBF 2012 was a bit of a positive outlier for UofC. Going by the school-reported numbers for fed clerkships:

2012: 15.02%
2011: 9.59%
2010: 12.53%
2009: 8.32%

Though these are only the numbers for people who got clerkships within 9 months of graduation; if you expand that to the total number of clerks from a class, the numbers change to:

2012: 22.32%
2011: 20.2%
2010: 26.15%
2009: 16.01%

Obviously older classes have had more time to obtain alum clerkships, so one would expect the 2012 number in particular to continue rising. It's also obviously not worth comparing these to 9mo numbers at other schools without running the same calculations for those as well.

Something I've always been interested in working out is, comparatively, which schools place more in CoA vs. DC; obviously it's not a perfect proxy for quality/preftige/whatever, but still could be valuable. I don't really feel like running these numbers for other schools (since I don't attend them), but for UofC:

2012: 54.16% of fed clerkships are CoA
2011: 70.73%
2010: 62%
2009: 63.63%

I think this can help put into perspective comparisons between schools with vastly different USNWR/ATL/whatever rankings but similar fed clerk rates. You'd expect the quality to be better at one over the other, but who knows. It may also not really be worth calculating outside of t14 because the numbers are so small that one or two really exceptional students could have a big effect on a particular class.

Where are you getting these numbers?

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/students/ca ... clerkships and http://www.law.uchicago.edu/prospective/employmentdata, then some division. I presume other schools have at least some of this data online as well, though some might keep it accessible only to attending students. I know we have lists of who clerked for which judge (so presumably you could make a list of "feeders" and see how competitively we placed students at those particular judges), but it's gated on our OCS blackboard site.

edit: I should also add that the second set of numbers might be double-counting people who went from DC -> CoA. It probably is, in fact. The two pages also disagree in some spots.

Thanks