Should A Clerkship Application Be Summarily Rejected For Having A Minor Error?

One of my most important roles is advising my students on clerkships. This process has changed significantly since I clerked from 2009-12. (I wrote about my story here.) Back in the day, under the hiring plan, law students would apply to clerkships over the summer after 2L. Judges were only allowed to contact applicants on a particular day in early September. And all interviews would be conducted over the the following week. Of course judges cheated then. Indeed, these “off plan” hires led to the implosion of the plan.

Today, we live in a free-for-all. I am reliably informed that at top-ranked schools, judges interview students and make offers before the first semester of grades are released. Some judges will hire students after they graduate college before they begin law school. Soon enough, high school students will start lining up judicial clerkships. Why wait?

At most other law schools, the clerkship process begins in earnest after two semesters of grades are released. By the time three semesters of grades are released, students are already interviewing for positions and accepting offers. Students can then apply for a second clerkship (the trend) with their fourth semester of grades. Most 3Ls in the clerkship game already have their careers planned out for several years.

As they say, don’t hate the player, hate the game. I work closely with my students at South Texas. I would submit that our clerk placement rate rivals schools that have been in the game for far longer. You can see our clerk roster here. But these efforts take a lot of work at very early junctures. Invariably, students have to target specific judges based on a range of factors, and hope the process works out. If they are dinged for unexpected reasons, it may become too late to rally for other judges.

One of the most difficult aspects of this process is the application screen. Imagine a student submits an application with a superlative package. They are top of their class, have glowing references professors who got to know them personally, thrived on journal and moot court, plus had relevant legal experience. The student has done everything right since they stepped foot on campus. But there is a glitch in the resume or the cover letter or the writing sample. Mind you, these materials have been reviewed by the student countless times, and also screened by professors and career service staff. Yet, something slipped through.

Should the application automatically be nixed? I can see both sides of the equation.

On the one hand, judges need to be able to implicitly rely on a clerk. That relationship requires that the student to have a exceptional attention to detail. Any error that leaves chambers ultimately falls to the judge, not the clerk. As the argument goes, if a student can submit a clerkship application with an error, that shows a lack of judgment that will infect the entire clerkship. How can this student be trusted? Application rejected. And for what it’s worth, when a clerk application is rejected, the applicant will seldom figure out why. After years of excellent work, a stray hyphen or a margin error can quietly disqualify the candidate for career-altering clerkship.

On the other hand, a clerkship application must be viewed as a whole. The resume is the sort of document that is reviewed so many times that errors become invisible. I think most professors have experienced this sort of fatigue when reviewing the same law review article through multiple rounds. Litigators have similar experience with briefs. The usual remedy is to have a fresh set of eyes to look over the materials–whether research assistants, student editors, or fellow associates. But doesn’t that fresh look defeat a primary purpose of the application: to determine the applicant’s attention to detail. Thus, there is a paradox. Applicants who try to play by the rules, and do not seek outside help, are more likely to include disqualify errors. Applicants who skirt the rules, and seek outside help, are less likely to include disqualify errors, and the judge will never know it. And now with AI, I have very little trust that the work students submit is actually their work. The importance of the written application becomes far less than the value of the references.

As regular readers of my posts can guess, I am not one to disqualify people for small errors–especially when the application is otherwise excellent. We should never judge a person by their worst moment, especially when every other aspect of the application is golden. Are typos and errors a problem for courts? You bet they are. Don’t believe me? The Supreme Court has an errata page for all of the corrections to opinions. Mind you, these are opinions reviewed by some of the smartest law school graduates around and double-checked a full staff of editors at the Court who scan citations. Errors will always slip through. It’s okay. I think most parties would rather have a timely opinion that gets the law right than an absolutely flawless opinion that takes far longer.

Still, I warn all of my students that failure to strictly scrutinize their clerkship applications could lead to a summary rejection, and they will never know it. It can’t be my job to find these errors, so the burden falls on them.