LAP Summer Intern Reflections - Improving the Legal Profession for My Future Peers

This week, LAP welcomes guest blogger Caleb Aguirre ‘24, a LAP summer intern, who reflects on his internship experience and explains how he is helping to improve the clerkship application process and legal profession for future generations of attorneys - his future peers.

I decided to intern with LAP this summer because I want to help ensure that future law clerks – my future peers – enter a more democratized and accountable clerkship culture. Before joining LAP, I had some lofty expectations that I hoped would come true, but nonetheless thought they were out of reach. I wanted to take a look under the hood of an up-and-coming nonprofit, work with a leader who I found to be inspiring, and contribute to a mission I saw as both pertinent and constructive. LAP is the organization at the intersection of all these expectations and I consider myself lucky to be a part of such a great team.

Before I started my internship, I oriented myself with LAP’s goals and the realities of the clerkship experience. I read President and Founder Aliza Shatzman’s written testimony and scholarship on some of problems that can arise between judges and clerks due to significant power disparities and the lack of workplace protections. Hearing about the lived experiences of law clerks while learning about the institutional importance of a judicial clerkship motivated me to start my internship with a sense of eagerness. With most internships, this invigorating feeling fades: interns get bogged down by a seemingly inevitable feeling that the work is futile. But as I began assisting with the legal technology aspects of LAP - the Post-Clerkship Survey and Clerkships Database - I discovered that the problems with the clerkship system that I hoped to help address are actively being corrected.

My co-interns and I work on a variety of tasks aimed at increasing LAP’s visibility in the legal community and supporting the day-to-day functioning of a legal technology and advocacy-focused nonprofit. I can see how my work helps LAP democratize information about judges as managers and clerkship experiences, thereby replacing the “whisper network” that students currently rely on for information about clerkships.

Assisting with preparation for and sitting in on some stakeholder meetings has taught me that there is a true, widely-felt absence of resources for judicial clerks. LAP’s Clerkships Database is the solution. Seeing LAP’s initiatives grow over the course of my internship has confirmed that a clerkship can be both a uniquely educational and foundational opportunity, and a job like any other, where employees who need support and resources can readily access them.

Working alongside Aliza and my co-interns has shown me that not only are resources being constructed and gathered for law clerks, but that the people behind the projects believe in them. As I continue to work at LAP this summer, I know that the work I’m doing helps to create a necessary resource for future law clerks. I hope that LAP’s post-clerkship survey and Clerkships Database become integrated into the clerkship application process so that judicial clerkships and the legal field generally can become more diverse and equitable for future attorneys like me.