The Legal Accountability Project’s Centralized Clerkships Database benefits every law school.

·      Student/Alumni Wellness – By participating in the Clerkships Database and ensuring that law clerks have positive clerkship experiences, law schools protect the next generation of young attorneys from workplace mistreatment and ensure that all graduates can pursue careers they love in safe workplaces.

·      Alumni retention – By ensuring positive clerkship experiences, the law school ensures that alumni will be happy, healthy, and not driven from the legal profession due to mistreatment or retaliation, thereby ensuring committed alumni who give back to their alma maters.

·      Attracting students – Law schools should be on the cutting edge of this exciting new initiative. This will help law schools attract better applicants. LAP regularly fields inquiries from prospective law students asking which law schools do the best job of fostering positive clerkship experiences and which ones do not.

·      Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging – It is disproportionately marginalized groups who are mistreated during clerkships. These students also disproportionately lack access to the formal networks and information channels that help some of their peers obtain clerkships. They have unique considerations when deciding whether and where to clerk, including whether judges hire diverse candidates and are sensitive to diverse identities. The Database will encourage more diverse students to clerk, thereby bolstering the law school’s diversity clerkship pipeline.

·      Improving the Clerkship Pipeline: Regardless of law schools’ existing resources, law students regularly convey to LAP that the clerkship application process is “opaque,” “confusing,” “nebulous,” and a “black box” and that they choose not to clerk because they lack transparent information. LAP’s Database will empower more students to clerk, armed with the confidence that they will be treated fairly and respectfully during both the interview process and their tenure as law clerks.

·      Judicial Externships – Many law schools offer judicial externship programs. Externship candidates can also read surveys in the Database before interning or externing for judges, thereby ensuring safe workplaces for student externs—and fostering student wellness.

·      Alumni Support – Law school alumni convey to LAP that they had negative clerkship experiences; wish the Database existed when they were students applying for clerkships; and did not feel empowered to share information with their law schools. Support for this initiative exists across alumni communities. LAP encourages law schools to listen to their alumni (and students) who resoundingly demand increased transparency in the clerkship application process.