Bankruptcy clerkships are an amazing opportunity.  Don’t overlook the chance to clerk in an area of the law that has a tendency to touch every other type of law.  They are a phenomenal experience for people who want to go into the practice of bankruptcy law and for those who want to broaden that search as well.

Are Bankruptcy clerks as prestigious as other federal clerkships?

All federal clerkships are prestigious, but some are more prestigious than others.  How prestigious a clerkship is turn on the court, the reputation of the judge, and the location of the clerkship.  For this reason, it is impossible to provide an exact ranking of clerkships.  Article III courts are often considered more prestigious than Article I courts, but there are many exceptions depending on what your long-term goals are.  Most employers look favorably on clerkships and consider federal clerkships of any kind to be prestigious.

If I do a bankruptcy clerkship, will I only be able to practice in bankruptcy afterwards?

No.  You will build significant bankruptcy expertise, but you will also learn about several other areas of law including consumer law, real estate, IP, Employment, Labor, Family and probate, and environmental law.  Many bankruptcy court clerks go on to transactional practice, particularly in debt financing.

If I want to do transactional law, will a bankruptcy clerkship be helpful?

Absolutely.  Business bankruptcies often include court-approved financing agreements, asset sales, and other transactions.  You will have more first-hand deals experience in a bankruptcy court than in any other kind of clerkship.

If I want to be a litigator will a bankruptcy clerkship be helpful?

Yes! Bankruptcy courts hear many adversary proceedings and other actions that are trials just like you would see in a district court.

What do lawyers do after a bankruptcy clerkship – i.e. where do they work?

They work in all kinds of practices and in all kinds of settings. You will even see former bankruptcy court clerks in-house in banks and consulting firms.

For a bankruptcy clerkship, are there locations that are more prestigious?

The courts that hear the so-called “mega” cases are considered the most prestigious.  These have historically been SDNY and Delaware, but many large cases pass through EDVA, Nevada, and elsewhere.

Who is a good candidate for a bankruptcy clerkship?

Any student who wants to clerk who is interested in bankruptcy, finance, and/or consumer law.

I haven’t taken Bankruptcy, can I still apply for a bankruptcy clerkship?

Yes.  While it is better to have taken or plan to take bankruptcy and secured transactions, we have had several students hired without having taken either class.

Be sure to request your letters of recommendations from faculty and notify jcrecommendations@wustl.edu by Friday, May 18, 2018 to avoid any delays in mailing materials starting in June. You can and should continue updating your materials when you know more about your grades and whether you have made journal.

Nuts and Bolts

Now is the time to get ready to apply for clerkships! The faculty and CCD have put together the information that you need to apply in this post.  Every judge is looking for something slightly different, so we can’t cover everything here.  But if you work through the Clerkship Application Checklist , you’ll be ready to apply to most judges as soon as you have your spring grades and receive the results of the write-on competition. Your goal should be have your application ready to send out as soon as you receive your spring grades and learn the journal results since many judges have recently started hiring in early summer.

If you have any questions, you should email Professors Epps, D’Onfro, Finneran, Magarian, and Keating!  We’ll update this blog with FAQs as they come in and we’re always happy to answer individual questions as well.  We want you to put together the best application possible.

Resume. You should have a resume that is in good shape from your summer job hunt.  Now, just add your summer position(s) and any new honors or activities, such as journal membership.  Once you have lined up a job for your 2L summer, add that as well. Unless you have significant pre-law school work experience, keep it to one page.  If you’d like an example, this is Prof. D’Onfro’s resume from when she applied for clerkships.

References. You should plan to ask 2-3 people for references.  Some positions only require two references, but more competitive judges, especially at the federal appellate level, typically prefer three.  Ideally, two of your references will be faculty members from your first-year or upper-level substantive classes.  We ask that you fill out the Judicial Clerkship Reference Request Form and include that when you ask faculty for a reference.  Once you have confirmed your faculty recommenders, email their names to jcrecommendations@wulaw.wustl.edu along with copies of your Judicial Clerkship Reference Request Forms.

 Cover Letter. You will send a short, generic cover letter to most judges. It should convey the basic information about you, but it isn’t a personal statement about why you want to clerk. And it won’t impress the judge for you to extol your virtues in the letter.  Here is a sample of what we recommend.  For judges where you have some real connection—most importantly, a personal geographic connection to where the judge sits—you should add a sentence or two explaining that fact.  Your goal in including this information is to make the judge realize why you might be particularly interested in clerking in, say, Wyoming—and thus why you’re likely to accept an offer.  If you intend to stay in their geographic region after clerking, you should mention that where applicable. For clerkships where you have no geographic connection or interest, focus on your general interest in clerking, and the specific court you are applying to where possible.

Transcripts. Make sure you have a few official undergraduate transcripts on hand for the judges who request them. (We only know of a handful of state clerkships that ask for official transcripts, but since these can take a few weeks to get from your prior institutions, get them now!)  Spend time now making an unofficial law school transcript so that you don’t have to do it later.

Writing Sample. Make sure you have something that has not been edited by anyone else.  If you’re just finishing 1L, your legal writing assignments are probably your best bet until you have a chance to develop a better writing sample though your summer position, a clinic, moot court, or a seminar paper.  Pay attention to what judges on your list are asking for, since some ask for persuasive writing while others prefer law review-style notes.  Fortunately, most don’t have a preference.

List of Judges.  To maximize your chances of success, apply broadly—a list of 50+ judges is a good start, but you should even go broader than that.  If you have strong recommendations and interview well, anything is possible—and, for better or for worse, luck plays a significant role.

Clerkships are nationally transferable credentials that will propel you to the highest echelon of the legal profession. Given that, it’s not a good idea to limit your search to a narrow geographic area. Even if you want to practice long-term in, say, San Diego, it isn’t a good strategy to only apply to San Diego-based judges. That will significantly limit your options—and make it a lot less likely you’ll get a clerkship.

You should also consider state court clerkships, which are often somewhat less competitive than federal clerkships but no less rewarding.  We have some excellent resources for researching state court opportunities on the judicial clerkships website.

But don’t stop there! If you love criminal law or crave trial experience, consider federal magistrate clerkships.  If you see yourself working in banking, securities, consumer, or commercial law down the road, consider federal bankruptcy clerkships.  And don’t overlook the other specialized courts like the Federal Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, the United States Court of Federal Claims, and the various administrative courts.  NALP has a great guide covering opportunities with ALJs.

In short, no matter where you are in the class, there is a clerkship for which you’re a viable candidate.  Make an appointment with one of us to discuss your best strategy if you are not sure.

Once you have a list, fill out the State and/or Federal Judicial Clerkship Applications Spreadsheet and send it to jcrecommendations@wulaw.wustl.edu.  May 18, 2018 is the deadline for priority handling of applications over the summer.  All other requests will be processed in the order they are received.  You can make changes to this spreadsheet after you submit it, but please be considerate of the administrative staff.

Your note for the journal writing competition can also serve as a clerkship writing sample.  You’ll of course want to put in the time to ensure your note secures you a place on the journal of your choice.  That same focus and effort will help you craft a compelling sample that highlights your reasoning, research, and writing ability and can strengthen your clerkship applications.  Best of luck!

On Behalf of the Clerkship Committee. Please contact Professor D’Onfro, Professor Finneran, Professor Richards, Professor Sachs or Mahrya Fulfer Page with questions.

Dear Class of 2019:

If you are interested in clerking, the time to send out applications is now! A number of judges are actively interviewing so the sooner you can send out your applications, the better.  If you have already sent out applications but not yet heard from judges, you should send an updated resume and grade sheet along with a letter reiterating your interest in the clerkship.

You should not wait for either the new class rankings or your letters of recommendation to send out applications.  You can note that the class rank for the fall is not yet available.  When it becomes available, you can update your applications.  If you used our form cover letter, it is carefully worded so that you can send your materials ahead of your references.  Judges who are interested in you but still missing a letter are likely to call the reference (many call even if they receive letters).  The most important thing is for you to send out your materials before your target judges finish hiring.

As a reminder, we now have master lists of the names and addresses of (nearly) all state and federal judges on Symplicity.  Use them to apply broadly.

Best of luck!

The Clerkship Committee

Since you are already accustomed to living on a budget, don’t let compensation get in the way of pursuing this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A clerkship may not be your most immediately lucrative option after graduation, but your clerkship will help you make connections that will help throughout your career. The nature of the judicial appointment and election processes naturally mean that judges tend to be extremely connected people! A phone call from the circuit judge for whom I clerked helped me secure my first post-clerkship job as an Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles! And your career isn’t measured in the year or two of lower compensation while you are clerking. Some clerkships open doors that will make the financial sky-the-limit. And as corny as it may sound, you may end up looking back fondly on the financial challenge. My clerkship salary was supporting me, my husband, and then two-year-old daughter. We couldn’t afford a rental car when our sole car needed repairs. So I rode each day to and from the three-day California bar exam on the back seat of a tandem bike with our daughter behind us in a trailer. It was actually kind of fun, and my husband and I still laugh about the situation. The bottomline: rarely does anyone regret clerking, despite the lesser compensation; but people often regret not clerking!

Why do people rave so much about clerkships? Where do you begin to answer that question—Is it the nature of the work? The power to help decide issues? The challenge of acting as a neutral rather than advocate? The list goes on. But I want to focus on the last one today. As a law clerk, your judge will likely ask your opinion as to how the judge should rule. The ultimate decision, of course, belongs to the judge. But your opinion will help guide the judge’s final choice. Guess what—you have received very little hands-on training in serving as a neutral. If you worked at a firm in the summer or externed at a non-profit or participated in a school clinic, you were advocating for a party. You generally knew which result you preferred, and your job was to craft the best argument to support that conclusion. Well, throw that bias away. As a clerk, your job is to help determine the correct result, unconstrained by client preferences. This is far more challenging than it sounds and is one of the first obstacles a new clerk encounters. I cannot think of another position that provides this unique opportunity. This challenge can be quite intimidating in the beginning, but you and your co-clerks will learn to master this challenge during your time in chambers, developing an unspoken understanding of what you have accomplished.

Judicial internships and judicial clerkships are not the same.  A judicial clerkship is a post-graduate clerk position (usually a term of 1 – 2 years).  A judicial internship is a summer position, that does not lead to a post-graduate position with the judge.

Are summer judicial internships beneficial?  Absolutely!  1L summer is the best time to consider a judicial internship.  Consider your long term career goals when deciding which judges you should apply to for a summer position.  We will help you navigate these decisions and the process.  We will help you prepare your application materials.  Impress your summer judge and you may find that doors open for post-graduate clerkships with other judges.  Apply over winter break.

Are summer judicial internships paid?  No.  Never.  You should simply feel grateful for a great opportunity. However, the 1L summer public interest program at WashULaw does fund summer internships.  More information is coming soon.  Also, some organizations, like the ABA, will fund a judicial internship.

Clerking is not only a fantastic stepping stone to a successful career, but clerking itself can be a rewarding career.  Please drop in the CCD on Tuesday (10-24) to meet career clerk Michelle Akinsiku Hayde (2006) from 12:15-1:00 for Attorney Tuesday.

Michelle is career clerk for Judge Staci M. Yandle.  She began her legal career as a litigator- first with the Attorney General’s office and then with litigation firms.  Since March 2015, Michelle been clerking with the Southern District of Illinois.  She completed a temporary clerkship with Judge Rosenstengel from March 2015-August 2015 and then began a clerkship with Judge Yandle in August 2015.  In March 2016, Michelle accepted a career clerkship with Judge Yandle and has found clerking to be a wonderful and rewarding position.