Statute of Frogs

By the time you’re applying for clerkships, your resumé and transcript are pretty much what they are. So, while they are really important to your application, they’re very hard to change late in the game. So the two places to concentrate efforts are recommendations and writing sample.

In our chambers, and I suspect in most of them, the first cut is going to be based on your grades and your resumé. But once you’ve made the first cut, the most important thing is having something that makes your application stand out from the big pile.¹ That could be an entry in your resumé² or something else in your packet, but it’s important that there be something. There are a tremendous number of well-qualified applicants and catching the reader’s³ interest is vital. Remember that, in addition to picking an employee, the judge is picking someone he or she will have to work closely with for a year. No one likes to work with boring people. So be interesting.

One way to do that is with a particularly good recommendation. At least 90% of the recommendations I’ve seen are of the form “X was a strong participant in my class and got one of the highest grades on the final exam.” While that’s all well and good, it doesn’t really say anything that isn’t already on your transcript. And it doesn’t separate you from the pack.

The reason most recommendations are like this, of course, is that professors tend not to know most of their students very well. Even if the professor meets with you before writing the recommendation, mostly she’ll just be rehashing information that is included elsewhere in your packet. So, rather than picking the professors in whose classes you got the best grades, I would pick the professors who know the most about you. If you’ve worked closely with a professor as a research assistant or in a seminar, that’s ideal. Or maybe the faculty member who runs a clinic you’ve participated in knows your work well. Unless that professor can say something meaningful about you, there’s not much added value in a rec from a really famous professor. A generic recommendation doesn’t get much added cachet just because it’s written by Erwin Chemerinsky.

It’s clear when reading a recommendation whether the writer really “knows” this student. If there’s no professor who can write knowledgeably about your work, consider someone you worked with over a summer. While it’s probably important to have at least two recs from faculty, you could range a little wider for a third rec. Recs from other judges (if you’ve interned or some such) tend to be brief and perfunctory, so that’s not a great option unless you’re sure the judge will really talk about your work.⁴

The bottom line is that, as much as possible, you want recommenders who can talk in some detail about the quality of your written work and your legal analysis skills and who can say something about you that isn’t obvious from the rest of the paper in your packet. It’s hard for an 80-person socratic class to provide that, no matter how well you did on the exam.

1. I’m sure there are judges for whom grades are the most important factor throughout the process, but for many, once you’ve crossed the grades threshold, other factors start to take precedence. [↩]
2. If you spent a summer do something really interesting, that should be prominent even if it’s not legally-oriented. [↩]
3. While the judge, of course, makes the final choice, a lot of the process may be done by the clerks and/or the secretary. [↩]
4. In a lot of chamber with interns, the interns work mostly with the clerks, not the judge, so the judge is often not in a position to say much about their work. [↩]