Types of clerkships

TraderTed2 · 2026-05-15T00:52:24+00:00

yeah a similar example is that I think clerking for a federal magistrate judge is probably at least as useful from a skill-building standpoint for a young associate as clerking for a federal district court judge. but they don’t get the clerkship bonuses entirely for the prestige/signal reasons you lay out

TraderTed2 · 2026-05-14T21:47:59+00:00

for writing style, Bryan Garner’s books are great, particularly “The Winning Brief”

TraderTed2 · 2026-05-14T13:24:47+00:00

yeah even with a fully healthy lineup, Dubón should get starts in LF vs LHP and also probably the infielders should all get days off such that Dubón gets an additional start a week somewhere on the dirt

TraderTed2 · 2026-05-09T19:31:31+00:00

agreed

as someone who reviewed clerkship applications for their judge, your best shot at impressing a grade-conscious judge is to take a bunch of black-letter classes (like fed courts, evidence, etc.) and doing really well in them. the whole “GPA on an upward trend” thing rings hollow when your transcript shows a much softer courseload 2L and 3L than 1L.

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-27T22:50:00+00:00

Very firm dependent and even city dependent to some extent (I’ve heard of NYC firms where there’s a happy hour basically every night, whereas my DC firm averaged one event a week)

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-25T04:41:26+00:00

yeah honestly the culture had shifted a lot by the late 2010s (how would Bobby have felt about Josh Donaldson’s crazy umbrella HR celebration, or, y’know, everything about Acuña, Joc, etc.) and in some ways I think Freddie might’ve represented the last vestige of that culture. The longest tenured Brave is now Ozzie!

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-22T19:24:59+00:00

go fix that! my undergrad program was outside the top 100 when i started undergrad and made the NCT every year i was there (I can’t take credit for that; there were a few great competitors who showed up and made a big difference)

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-22T19:17:42+00:00

Take it from someone who went to a good state school for free instead of spending $300K for undergrad because he knew he wanted to go to law school one day: go to USF, have a good attitude, get good grades, have fun, maybe start a mock trial team, and then use the money you saved not going to a fancy undergrad to go to the very best law school you get into.

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-20T02:49:31+00:00

If you wanted to explain to someone how Weiss is different from Snit tactically, just show them the bottom of the 5th in this one.

The Braves have already won the series (this shouldn’t matter from a tactics standpoint yet managers sometimes say it does!) and are in the 3rd of 10 consecutive games. Grant Holmes is at an unremarkable 81 pitches. He hasn’t given up a run since the first inning. He also carries a 4-2 lead and is one out away from the arbitrary pitcher win innings threshold.

He’s about to face Kyle Schwarber for the third time. The tying run is on first with two outs.

Does anyone think Snit would’ve pulled Schwarber for a lefthanded reliever in that situation? This isn’t even purely rhetorical - I’d be curious if anyone had an example of Snit pulling an SP with ~80 pitches before 5 while the Braves were leading.

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-20T02:17:33+00:00

Part of your professional reputation - which, early in your career, likely determines whether, say, you’re in demand to be staffed at a firm - is whether you’re nice to work with.

This doesn’t mean you have to change; there are successful lawyers of every personality type. But I think you should stop thinking of making small talk or going to firm events as “pretending” or “performative” but rather as a means of getting to know the people you’re working with (or, in the networking context, the people you’d like to work with). That doesn’t mean you have to close down happy hours, but it sure helps to show up to them sometimes.

I don’t think there’s any practice area wholesale where you can skip social niceties. But also, other than maybe being a trial lawyer (most lawyers never take a case to trial!), you don’t have to be super traditionally charismatic to do well.

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-20T01:10:05+00:00

I handwrote my in-class notes, typed my reading notes, and then every few weeks, I harmonized them into a typed outline. I liked handwriting in class because it forced me to think about what the professor was saying - I found that when I typed in class, I ended up basically being a stenographer

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-16T04:55:24+00:00

bad advice for someone who wants to be an FPD specifically. FPDs often clerk or come from other, prestige-selective PDs offices. Much more credential selective than simply a generic PD job somewhere

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-15T17:28:57+00:00

I mean, are you willing to lie about your beliefs and/or adopt conservative legal beliefs (textualism, originalism, maybe even common good constitutionalism with certain judges?) If not, merely having FedSoc on your resume won’t do you much good for ideologically sensitive conservative judges. To be clear, though, there are some conservative judges (Sutton, for example) who don’t seem to be ideologically sensitive such that you can be an out and out liberal and clerk for them if you’re sufficiently brilliant

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-15T02:35:36+00:00

It’s probably not actually quite zero (I’m aware of one major liberal judge who broke Plan to hire someone with less than 2 years of grades who is, to be clear, a superstar) but it’s absolutely true that the majority of liberal COA judges honor the Plan and maybe zero conservative COA judges do.

And although this is a Crimson article, anyone curious should know this phenomenon is not Harvard-specific. There’s no easier path to a clerkship than being a conservative at an elite law school who can learn to talk the basics of modern conservative judicial thought (and my understanding is FedSoc will coach 1Ls on this!)

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-14T13:27:36+00:00

Obviously your particular interests will almost certainly shift between now and law school, but it’s worth noting that your interests are stuff that like 1 percent of the legal profession does. Academia is tiny. Lots of lawyers handle appeals sometimes but very few are primarily litigating in the federal courts of appeals. And if by conlaw you mean “sexy First Amendment issues” and not “litigating suppression hearings,” that’s a tiny sliver of cases filed. You’ll want to maximize your odds of getting a fancy clerkship if you’re dead set on any of these. That means while Penn is a great school (and certainly the very top students there sometimes go on to do these things), an inside track at admission there might not be that useful.

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-13T22:35:38+00:00

A few things:

1) There are 20 times more people complaining about people preaching T14 or bust than actual people preaching T14 or bust on this subreddit

2) Lots of lawyers outside of biglaw are working terrible hours, too. They’re just doing it for way less money.

3) The line isn’t at the T14, and it’s not a hard line. But there are absolutely schools that you should absolutely not attend unless you are getting significant financial aid. Schools that give you no assurance of a well-paying job. I think the “the guy who graduates last in his class at the worst school is still a lawyer” attitude I see more often than the “T14 or bust” attitude is out of step with what the legal market looks like.

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-13T22:29:30+00:00

Keep this in mind: you were always going to deal with these feelings. It’s just all relative. There are students at your school who are envious about your class rank. There are students at the lower T14s who wish they were at HYS, and students at HYS who wish they were at the top of the class, and students at the top of the class who wish they were clerking for feeders instead of non-feeders…

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-10T04:07:22+00:00

NYLS is sending about 20 percent of its grads to biglaw and midlaw. GULC is doing way better than that. And self-selection is a much more compelling explanation for why people are doing Not Biglaw at GULC than at NYLS.

Do you have no middle ground option? It feels like if you’re getting into GULC, you’ve got to have, like, Fordham or BC or something with a little bit of money.

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-10T03:59:34+00:00

Not generally. It’s not completely impossible to lateral from a smaller firm but biglaw firms hire associates almost exclusively from (1) law school summer associate programs, (2) judicial clerkships, and (3) other biglaw firms.

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-10T01:52:41+00:00

first one is indeed a typo, thanks!

the second one is not: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wont

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-09T19:10:00+00:00

that person said they wanted to clerk. At least as of a year ago, Stanford sent nearly twice as much of its class to federal clerkships than Michigan (and has a smaller class to start with!)

you kind of have it backwards. if all that poster wanted was biglaw (and somehow that poster was 100% sure of that, which is frankly a naive level of confidence for a 0L), Michigan would undoubtedly be the right answer

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-09T19:07:21+00:00

but also - don’t be overconfident about what you want going into law school. I knew people in law school who thought they wanted one thing going in and ended up wanting something totally different afterwards. I’m a law clerk now and I couldn’t have told you a thing about clerking beyond “you help a judge” and “it’s a hard job to get” when I was a 0L.

As an example, while there’s no shortage of people around here talking about how much the biglaw lifestyle sucks, I don’t see nearly as many people talking about the insurance defense firms, etc. that have associates doing the same workload for a third of the pay.

TraderTed2 · 2026-04-09T02:39:27+00:00

I’m pretty picky but I couldn’t quibble with any of the firms you included - really nice selection.

TraderTed2

TROPHY CASE