LAP Announces March 2024 Launch Date for Centralized Clerkships Database and Opens Pre-Registration Period
Thursday, February 22, 2024
For Immediate Release
Contact: Aliza Shatzman, 267-481-2095, aliza.shatzman@legalaccountabilityproject.org
The Legal Accountability Project Announced March 2024 Launch Date for Centralized Clerkships Database and Opens Pre-Registration Period
Today, The Legal Accountability Project (LAP) is announcing an unprecedented step as part of LAP’s efforts to ensure transparency, accountability, and equity in judicial clerkships. In March 2024, LAP will launch a Centralized Clerkships Database that will democratize information about federal and state judges for all law students and graduates seeking clerkships. And starting today, students and graduates who are pursuing clerkships can pre-register for Database access.
In 2022, LAP was founded to solve historically intractable social problems in judicial clerkships, particularly a troubling lack of transparent, candid information in the clerkship hiring process. To provide greater transparency and accountability in this hiring process, LAP has built a Centralized Clerkships Database that contains more than 800 post-clerkship surveys from former federal and state clerks nationwide. Every week, LAP receives additional surveys from former clerks.
“Considering the enormous premium the legal profession places on judicial clerkships and the outsized influence that a relationship with a judge will have on a new attorney’s future career success, we owe it to the next generation of lawyers to ensure transparency, accountability, and safe workplaces,” explained LAP’s President Aliza Shatzman. Furthermore, “The Clerkships Database replaces the ‘whisper networks’ which are currently one of the only ways for aspiring clerks to obtain incomplete information about judges and judicial clerkships.”
When LAP launches this Centralized Clerkships Database in March 2024, the Database will be the largest independent repository of clerkship information in the nation, ensuring students and graduates from every U.S. law school can learn more about former clerks’ experiences with the judges for whom they clerked. Surveys in the Database provide a wealth of helpful information about what it’s like to clerk for different judges, so clerkship applicants can make well-informed decisions about which judges to apply to, interview with, and work for.
“The Clerkships Database creates a great opportunity not only to broaden the pool of clerkship candidates, but the pool of judges to whom candidates might consider applying,” explained LAP board member Judge Douglas Nazarian, who serves on the Appellate Court of Maryland. Furthermore, “The more information candidates have, the more comfortable they can be about the decision to apply in the first place and the decision to apply to particular judges. That’s good for candidates and for judges, who rely on our clerks to serve the public effectively.”
Individual law students and graduates can pre-register for the Centralized Clerkships Database this year for $20 per user. In addition, LAP will make the Database available to all students at any law school that pays an annual cost of $5 per law student. As law schools subscribe to the Database, individual students will no longer be required to pay an annual fee.
Today, clerkship applicants can visit survey.legalaccountabilityproject.org to pre-register for Clerkships Database access. In March, after LAP has verified that its users are law students or graduates seeking judicial clerkships, we will send authorized users user agreements and several payment options.
In launching this Database, LAP’s goals are to ensure that as many students as possible benefit from this valuable resource during the 2024 clerkship application cycle to identify a beneficial clerkship; that critical clerkship resources and information about law clerks’ experiences will no longer be limited to students who attend small number of top law schools; and to generate user feedback on the Database to improve it for future hiring cycles.
We hope student users will encourage their law schools to subscribe on behalf of all students in the coming months and years. And LAP has been in a constructive dialogue with a number of law schools about subscribing on behalf of their students.
LAP intends to launch the Clerkships Database in March for this first cohort of student users. In March, pre-registered users can log into our Database and read hundreds of surveys about hundreds of judges they would not otherwise know about, vastly increasing the breadth and candor of information accessible to them, and broadening the pool of judges to whom they can apply for clerkship positions.
LAP has achieved what few thought possible: we have finally democratized information about judges and judicial clerkships. We’re excited for clerkship applicants to benefit from the Clerkships Database this hiring cycle.