Most Federal Clerkship Applicants are law grads now

1,200 jobs - 400,000 applications.  That is the tangle created by the ease of online application for federal judicial clerkships - and the disruption of the market for high-scoring law school graduates, according to a recent article in the New Jersey Law Journal.  Most applicants now are graduates - not students in their final year.

One reaction of judges is to withdraw from the OSCAR system, according to Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who heads up the federal judiciary's OSCAR committee and sits in the Eastern District of New York.

Garaufis is one of a growing numbers of federal judges who no longer hires clerks directly out of law school. His clerks come from the ranks of young lawyers who have worked in firms. Garaufis says that restricting his hiring to experienced lawyers reduces the pile of resumes to be reviewed.

The OSCAR system allows a judge to sort applications by law school, law journal experience, specific areas of legal experience and numerous other criteria.

Even so, it's hard to get a sense of an applicant's suitability from raw data, says U.S. District Judge Dennis Cavanaugh in Newark. Even a valedictorian might not be the best person to hire, he says.

He says he can't come close to reviewing all 1,000 or so resumes he receives. Instead, he finds many of his clerks from recommendations and also has selected from a number of judicial interns who have shown their mettle.

Noel Hillman, one of six federal judges in New Jersey who do not accept online applications, says he has cut the number of applications from 1,500 to about 500 by accepting mail queries only.

Cavanaugh and Hillman are examples of judges who are benefiting from the emergence of practitioners as applicants on the district court level.

One of Cavanaugh's current clerks is a former law firm associate. And Hillman has no 2009 graduates among his three clerks. One has held the job permanently since 2006, one clerked for a year for another judge, and the other had a prior stint as a clerk and had worked in private practice.