Law Schools Are Lying To Students About Judicial Clerkships - Above the Law

"Law school career services offices have historically been clerkship gatekeepers and facilitators - hoarding information, providing incomplete resources, and hosting one-sided programming to facilitate clerkship opportunities for students. Yet schools' overwhelmingly positive and misleading messaging provides a dangerously rosy and overly optimistic picture of clerking. Biased advising fail to highlight potential downsides, let alone negative experiences that are all too common in hierarchical, unregulated work environments."

"By creating unrealistic expectations, schools set students up for failure: if clerks are mistreated, they self-internalize criticism and assume they're to blame. So, they keep their heads down and stay silent, perpetuating the problem by failing to warn others. Beyond this, law schools have misaligned incentives: they don't always have students' best interests at heart. They're far more interested in placing as many students as possible into prestigious clerkships, and maintaining relationships with judges (even abusive ones). They care about prestige over positive experience: clerks' well-being barely makes the priority list."

"In April 2024, The Legal Accountability Project (LAP) upended the clerkship system by launching " Glassdoor for Judges" to correct informational asymmetries and warn students about abusive judges. LAP's nationwide Clerkships Database democratizes clerkships: clerks review judges as managers, and students take agency over their careers by paying a small annual fee to access exponentially more information than they otherwise could."

Law school career services have functioned as clerkship gatekeepers by hoarding information, offering incomplete resources, and running one-sided programming that overstates clerking benefits. Overwhelmingly positive and misleading messaging creates unrealistic expectations and suppresses discussion of common negative experiences in hierarchical, unregulated workplaces. Institutional incentives prioritize placing students into prestigious clerkships and preserving judge relationships over clerks' well-being. Mistreated clerks often internalize blame, remain silent, and fail to warn peers. The Legal Accountability Project launched a nationwide, paid Clerkships Database where clerks review judges, enabling students to access broader information and avoid abusive judges; LAP served over 3,000 students in 18 months.

Read at Above the Law