Southern Ms. Part IV: Lawyerettes

I'm often hesitant to tell people I'm an attorney. Suffice it to say the achievement of graduating from law school and passing the bar is dampened by finding oneself the butt of many many jokes. But in Memphis, I find myself asserting my professional status more because otherwise I find folks assume I'm a secretary.

Decisions, Decisions: Choosing a Clerkship (or a Firm Job)

I find myself comparing the search for a clerkship to the callback process one suffers through as a 2L. Sitting in the airport, again, listening to my fellow classmates talking about how many offers they received from various firms, I find my mind wandering to those 3Ls who are applying to hundreds of clerkships with the hope that one might work out. In both interviewing with law firms and applying to clerkships, it seems as though each process lacks a discretion that we normally use in our lives. Our future employment is an incredibly important decision. We are deciding on a lifestyle choice, where we will set up residency, the type of work we will receive, how we will be treated. And yet, it seems to me that students, especially those who have eight, nine, ten offers of employment, don't think about these future matters which bear so greatly on their lives but instead go to sources like the vault.com, "the American Lawyer Review," and other such lists that rank law firms by prestige.

The Permanent Clerk

Working with a law clerk at a federal court as an externship, I became amazed at how much work these permanent clerks actually accomplish. The permanent law clerk and her secretary essentially run the courtroom and chambers, assigning our work, going through the docket and giving the judges his cases, and even briefing him on every case.

Although the law clerks and the secretaries do tend to be women, the law clerks, for the most part, are all practicing attorneys who at one point practiced in the private sector and have a degree of specialization in some area of the law...

The Strategic Clerkship Application

I am the first person in my immediate and extended family to attend law school. So, I had no idea that judicial clerkships existed, let alone that my application was being shaped the minute I walked into my first law school class. By the time I’d figured out what a clerkship is, that I wanted a clerkship, and what I needed to do to get one, I was well into my second year of law school and getting ready to put the actual applications together. I still managed to land a clerkship, but now I realize I could have been much more strategic, for better or worse, about the clerkship process. Here are two things that are critical in the clerkship application process and that I could have been more startegic about.