“Considering the enormous premium the legal community places on judicial clerkships and their outsized influence on attorneys’ future career success, we owe it to the next generation of attorneys to ensure transparency, accountability, and safe workplaces.”

Centralized Clerkships Database

A judicial clerkship is a particularly consequential first legal job, considering the outsized importance of a relationship with a judge on an attorney’s future success. Therefore, it is particularly important for clerkship applicants to identify the right clerkship. This is challenging for students, since so little candid, transparent clerkship information is accessible to them, and how selectively it is shared. LAP’s Centralized Clerkships Database provides broader, more equitable, more candid information about judges as managers, chambers culture, and clerkship experiences, thereby ensuring that everyone who wants to clerk can obtain baseline information.

LAP’s Clerkships Database fosters beneficial clerkship experiences and diversifies clerkship applicant pools by democratizing information about judges and increasing transparency in the clerkship application process. Former federal and state law clerks nation-wide have been submitting post-clerkship surveys about their clerkship experiences since April 2023. Law students and alumni considering post-graduate clerkships or judicial externships can read all the surveys, in order to identify judges who will create positive work environments and avoid judges who mistreat clerks. The Clerkships Database replaces the “whisper networks” which are currently one of the only ways for prospective clerks to obtain information about judges. This initiative ensures that applicants have as much information about as many judges as possible before making important career decisions about clerking. 

The Clerkships Database will also empower more diverse students to pursue clerkships, thereby bolstering schools’ clerkship programs. Transparency benefits every student, but particularly diverse students, who have unique considerations when deciding whether and where to clerk—including an interest in identifying judges who hire diverse candidates and who are sensitive to diverse identities. 

The Clerkships Database is populated with post-clerkship survey responses and contains the following information about judges: judge’s name, state, court, appointing president or governor (if applicable), appointment year, law school, race, gender, and active/senior status. It also contains the following information within surveys: clerkship interview and clerkship experience questions (drawing out both positive and negative information), including about workplace environment, feedback provided, perspective on tasks, and work/life balance during the clerkship; and rating of the overall clerkship experience and each judge as a manager (positive, neutral, or negative). This transparency and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative is the best way to transform the outdated clerkship application process - and improve the legal profession - for the next generation of attorneys. 

Through LAP’s post-clerkship survey and Clerkships Database content-moderation processes, LAP assures law clerks of anonymity in their responses if they choose, thus encouraging more respondents and greater candor in the content of responses. This assurance benefits clerks, law students, and participating law schools alike, since it encourages a higher response rate and therefore allows for a greater breadth of information available to those considering clerkships, as well as those involved with clerkship advising. 

The Clerkships Database is not a public-access website. Neither judges nor journalists will have access to it, in order to ensure greater candor in law clerks' survey submissions. The Clerkships Database employs various security features for all users to ensure that only those who are authorized to either read or write surveys can access the Clerkships Database. 

Authorized users create accounts with LAP that include their first and last name, email address, law school affiliation, and graduation year. Users’ law schools may verify that they clerked. Clerks’ names will not be accessible to students reading surveys in the Clerkships Database unless clerks affirmatively choose: their names are provided upon registration solely to verify that they are authorized users. This system ensures security and also lessens law clerks’ concerns about reputational harm in the legal community and retaliation by judges that have thus far precluded them from sharing nuanced or negative clerkship experiences.

The Clerkships Database is a subscription model. Participating law schools can pay $5 per law student per year, based on total JD enrollment, to grant access to all of their students and young alumni considering clerkships. Clerkship Directors and Deans of Career Services will also be granted access this way. 

Additionally, individual law students and attorneys from non-participating law schools can sign up for Clerkships Database access at survey.legalaccountabilityproject.org for a small fee of $20 per user for this clerkship hiring cycle, four times the price their law schools would pay to subscribe on their behalf. More information can be found here. Please note that this individual subscribers fee is only for students and young alumni considering clerkships. Law school administrators can only obtain access to the Clerkships Database through the law school subscription model. Furthermore, neither individual law professors, nor law school administrators outside of career services, can pay to access the Database this year. 

The Clerkships Database is one of the best ways to ensure positive clerkship experiences for the next generation of attorneys. This innovative initiative is an unprecedented step to ensure transparency, equity, and accountability in judicial clerkships. 

For additional information about the Clerkships Database, check out our Frequently Asked Questions section.