#525: Judicial Clerkship Truths Revealed, with Aliza Shatzman

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser (00:12): 

Hi, I’m Zack. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (00:13): 

Hi, I’m Jennifer Whigham, and this is episode 525 of the Lawyerist Podcast, brought to you by the Legal Talk Network. Today’s Stephanie talks with Aliza Shatzman about the Legal Accountability Project. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:24): 

Today’s podcast is brought to you by Rocket Matter, so stick around and you’ll hear my conversation with them a little bit later on. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (00:31): 

So Zack, we just got back from Lab Con, which is the unconference we put on for our Lawyerist lab members, and it was a blast. I had a really good time 

  

Zack Glaser (00:42): 

Was I had a really good time too. I guess obviously more importantly, a lot of people got a lot of good work done. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (00:49): 

Yeah, I mean, the one thing I really like about this conference, and I want to say reading the feedback forms, but everybody else liked about it, is that it’s not just, and we always say this when we promote it, it’s not just talking at the room, blah, blah, but it’s really not. We sent people off to do things like sprints. You have an hour go work on your operations manual. You have an hour. 

  

Zack Glaser (01:11): 

Oh, not wind sprints. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (01:12): 

Oh, no, not, no. Well, you did take people running. That’s true. And it got lost this year. No, 

  

Zack Glaser (01:19): 

I didn’t get lost this year. This was a big, big win for me, actually. But Sprints for their company, just kind of jumping in Sprint for getting a bunch of stuff done. Sprint, 

  

Jennifer Whigham (01:29): 

Yes. Like making marketing videos. We had an hour we’re like, you don’t need fancy equipment to make a marketing video. Get out your phone, make them right now during this hour. And to me that was extremely valuable for people. They came back with completed work products, which is the point of the whole thing. You start something, finish something, et cetera. 

  

Zack Glaser (01:50): 

Yeah, and I think it’s important to note that we didn’t just send people off into a corner and say, make a marketing video. We sent them with somebody that had experience with that and could really give people solid advice and say, here’s the type of lighting you want. I remember walking by that session and hearing the person that was running it really talking about, okay, well, we’re in natural lighting right now, and so you want to do this, this, and this. So it was very, I always say boots on the ground sort of thing, but a lot of actionable, not even actionable. A lot of action taken 

  

Jennifer Whigham (02:26): 

Action 

  

Zack Glaser (02:27): 

At Lab Con. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (02:29): 

Yeah, yeah, it was cool. And that’s what we do in Lab if you’re interested. That’s what we try to emulate at Lab Con is what we do virtually with your coaching and the workshops we do every week. So that was just sort of what we always call the Super Bowl. That’s a football thing, right? Super Bowl of, I’m kidding what the Super Bowl is. 

  

Zack Glaser (02:50): 

I think it’s the Puppy Bowl lab. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (02:52): 

The Puppy Bowl. It’s the puppy bowl of lab where we take everything we’ve done in lab and try to recreate in person. But what we do in lab, if you would like to be in lab, which you can be, and if you’re interested, we’ll put it in the show notes. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:05): 

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and now here is my conversation with Rocket Matter, and then we’ll head into Stephanie’s conversation with Eliza. 

  

(03:14): 

Hey y’all. And Zack here, the legal tech advisor at Lawyerist, and once again, I’ve got Joyce Brafford with me from CosmoLex ProfitSolv, timeSolv, but more importantly today, Rocket Matter. Joyce is a practice management specialist who is with Profits Solve, and fortunately for us, she comes on and talks to us a lot about practice management for Small medium, and I think with Rocket Matter large sized law firms. So Joyce, once again, thanks for being with me. 

  

Joyce Brafford (03:42): 

Oh, as always, Zack. Such a pleasure. Thank you for having me. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:45): 

So Rocket Matter has some big news. Yeah, you guys are launching a, well, let me have you say it, but you’ve got Rocket Matter Next Gen has come out. 

  

Joyce Brafford (04:00): 

That’s exactly right. Yeah. Rocket Matter Next Gen has officially launched. We are so excited about it. So number one, I just need to say to the entire team at Rocket Matter, our support team and the folks who allowed us to do this, congratulations. I mean, what a big deal. So what this means is our team has completely reimagined our user experience for Rocket matter customers and not just skin. This is not just a new skinning. We’re not playing Fortnite here. This is not just a re-imagining of the product. It is fundamentally at its core a redevelopment of what Rocket Matter can do. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:40): 

Okay. 

  

Joyce Brafford (04:41): 

We’re talking about enhanced project management, we’re talking about customizable dashboards, we’re talking about customizable data sets. We’re talking about the ability to have flexible recurring payment plans for your clients-and it’s just easy. It’s a beautiful, easy system that I am so proud to be a part of. And when you think about this from the world that we live in, Zack, where software is really just a product and we’ve got people that are responsible and we have to be responsible to our shareholders, the fact that this team didn’t just focus on small fixes to keep things going and what’s the most profitable, this team worked hard and got advice from stakeholders around the to develop a beautiful, elegant product. 

  

Zack Glaser (05:32): 

Well, so before we get into some of the big changes or big differences that people might see, what prompted the re-imagining or rethinking in such a big way instead of just a small little bits? 

  

Joyce Brafford (05:48): 

Yeah. Well, as you mentioned at the start of our session here, ProfitSolv is the parent brand of a lot of different solutions, including CosmoLex TimeSolv, Orion Tabs three, the list goes on and on. And what we have really coalesced around is this motto where our job is to give our clients the ability to be profitable and how do we do that? And it starts from the ground up. If you are in a law firm and you are using software, does that software enhance your profitability? Does it give you the ability to make more money, to have more time with your family, to spend more time at the lake house, to get a lake house if you want a lakehouse? Are we allowing our clients to live the aspirational desires that they had when they were in law school? And so that’s where we are. And that’s really the heart of Rocket Matter NextGen. And again, it’s elegant. It’s just you see it at the top of the stairs at a ball, and it’s gorgeous. Everyone says it’s beautiful. It’s a gorgeous product, and I’m very excited for anyone to take a look at it. 

  

Zack Glaser (07:05): 

Yeah, fantastic. So I am looking at the website here, and we’ve got on features, we’ve obviously got practice management features, we’ve got some organization features, which I consider to be kind of like the project management, but also reporting and integrations and whatnot. The interesting thing to me here is websites. We’ve got websites built into this, so it looks like you can, you’ve got turnkey professional websites straight from your profit solve or straight from your Rocket Matter product. 

  

Joyce Brafford (07:38): 

That’s exactly right. If you look at ProfitSolv, again, as a family of brands, what do you need? You need a tech stock, right? First you need a website where people can find you. Then you need a CRM to manage all of your marketing. Oh, great. That’s built in. We have that too. And then you have practice management and project management for your day-to-day tasks. All of it lives within one supported ecosystem where you have a single person who is responsible for helping you on your client journey. So no more calling around to multiple people, no more wondering why things broke. No more wondering about bizarre integrations with multiple products. You can get what you need from a single family of brands, and we’re excited to be part of any law firm’s journey. 

  

Zack Glaser (08:26): 

Love it. Love it. Well, I will also say before we wrap up here, that going through all of these things, we’ve got time tracking, legal billing, online payments, legal trust, accounting, contact management. It’s got a legal CRM. We’ve got obviously practice management, case management, legal document automation. And I’m just going through the features here and knowing Rocket matter, I know that these aren’t just things that they’re saying on there. So I going to have to make sure that we are thinking about Rocket Matter a little bit differently where this is more of a comprehensive product. Here it is, especially with that trust accounting kind of getting in there, which is frankly Joyce, what I kind of expect from that ProfitSolv families’ evolution is to go more towards we’ve got CosmoLex and TimeSolv and a lot of fantastic products that are great on their own, but also able to kind of say like, Hey, we’ve got this great thing that you could build into your other products as well. So yeah, I’m loving these different or additional more comprehensive features as well. So people that already have Rocket Matter, what is this going to look like to them? How is this adjusting? 

  

Joyce Brafford (09:55): 

I love that question. Yeah, you have the option to maintain your Rocket Matter classic if you’d like to, or you can go through a seamless, painless migration to the new product and you can call into Rocket Matter support or email Rocket Matter support, and they will walk you through that today. And it is a very, very quick migration. And of course, as always, with all of our products, training and onboarding is entirely free. And of course, Zack, if someone has looked at Rocket Matter in the past and decided it wasn’t for them, now’s the time to come back. So pop on over, join us for webinars, join us for training, take a stroll around the software with us with a free demo. We’d love to have 

  

Zack Glaser (10:37): 

You. Awesome. Well, and they can find that rocketmatter.com slash demo, and I would suggest to take another look at it, kick the tires. Yeah. Joyce, as always, thank you for being with me. I appreciate your time. 

  

Joyce Brafford (10:54): 

My pleasure. Thank you. Zack 

  

Aliza Shatzman (10:57): 

Hi, I’m Aliza Shatzman, I’m the president and founder of the Legal Accountability Project, a nonprofit aimed at ensuring that judicial law clerks have positive clerkship experiences while extending support and resources to those who don’t. 

  

Stephanie Everett (11:09): 

Awesome. It’s great to have you on the show today. And so maybe for those who might not be familiar with your work or you, I would love it if you could just maybe give us a little background on what got you started on this journey. 

  

Aliza Shatzman (11:24): 

Sure. So I did not set out when I graduated from law school, aspiring to launch and lead a court accountability nonprofit. I graduated from WashU Law five years ago in 2019, aspiring to be a homicide prosecutor in the DCUS attorney’s office. So after four different internships in different DOJ components decided to serve as a judicial law clerk in DC Superior Court. That is for anyone who doesn’t know when you spend a year or two working closely with and learning from a judge. And while these are typically messaged as overwhelmingly positive and very prestigious positions, unfortunately, as my experience illustrates, many are not. Judges are the most powerful members of our profession. Federal judges have life tenure. Even state court judges are very powerful. They have enormous power over their former clerk’s lives and careers. So clerked from 2019 to 2020, very, very bad experience that Google, it’s very public at this point, during which I was discriminated against, harassed, terminated, and then retaliated against by a now former judge who would tell me that I made him uncomfortable and he just felt more comfortable with my male code clerk told me that I was bossy like his wife. 

  

(12:46): 

He fired me over the phone during the pandemic. And when I reached out to hr, as many people would if they are experiencing workplace issue, I was told there was nothing HR could do because they didn’t regulate judges who of course are Senate confirmed, reached out to my law school. WashU Law found out this judge had a history of mystery clerks that the law school knew about at the time I’d accepted the clerkship and had decided not to share with me because they wanted another student to clerk. So that is obviously all really bad. But a year later, I had gone back on my feet, secured my dream job at the DC US Attorney’s office. I was a couple weeks into training when I received really devastating news that altered the course of my life. The USAO told me the judge had given me a negative reference that I would not be able to obtain a security clearance and that my job offer was being revoked. 

  

(13:43): 

So I filed a judicial complaint and hired attorneys, participated in the investigation into the now former judge’s misconduct. He was removed from the bench for other reasons a couple months later, and then issued a clarifying statement to the USAO addressing some not all of his outrageous claims about me. But by then the damage had been done and had been too long, and I was pretty much blackballed from what I thought was my dream job, how this relates to the work I’m doing now. During that summer when I was going through the judicial complaint process, I became aware that law clerks like me are exempt from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Folks like me cannot sue our harassers and seek damages for harms done to our careers reputations and future earning potential. Fortunately, there’s pending legislation that was introduced that summer called the Judiciary Accountability Act that would correct this injustice for more than 30,000 unprotected judiciary employees, including law clerks and federal public defenders. 

  

(14:43): 

So I reached out to some House and Senate offices to advocate for the legislation and share my experience. And I provided congressional testimony in March, 2022. In support of that bill and I launched the nonprofit pretty soon after to correct injustices I experienced as a law student and a law clerk, a lack of transparency in clerkship hiring that leads far too many to endure mistreatment like I did because we straight up lack information about judicial chambers, a lack of accountability for judges who mistreat their clerks and a lack of diversity and equity in judicial clerkships and the judiciary. And when I tell people, when I speak and share my experience, which is frequently now, my experience is not rare, but before I started talking about this, it was one that was really rarely shared publicly due to the culture of silence and fear surrounding the judiciary. 

  

Stephanie Everett (15:41): 

Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest, when I first kind of crossed path with you and your work, it wasn’t something that I was really aware of or that I knew. I mean, if I thought about it, I suspect I probably, I know a lot of friends who clerked. I didn’t personally clerk, but I know a lot of people who did. And so I was kind of intrigued by it because I was like, I’m proud that you’re getting this information out there because I do think it’s something that probably does happen and just people don’t talk about it, don’t know about it, or don’t really think about it every day. 

  

Aliza Shatzman (16:13): 

So judicial accountability is really having a moment. It’s been in the news a lot lately in early July. Now, former Alaska Federal Judge Joshua Kindred resigned in scandal after a 20 month investigation revealed appalling sexual harassment and abuse in his chambers. Then later that month, back-to-back reports were released by the Federal Judicial Center and then the GAO underscoring that the judiciary’s insistence on this bullshit mechanism of internal self-policing, it’s called the Employee Dispute Resolution plan, does not work. Employees don’t use it. The judiciary doesn’t release data on it, so we really can’t figure out whether it’s working and is really not solving these problems. So I’m glad people are talking about this more. I’m glad that the Legal accountability project has created the conditions for more law clerks to come forward, but truly I hear from mistreated clerks every single day. I was just looking at a message from one before we hopped on this recording, and I think they’re increasingly empowered to share their experiences, but judicial clerkships are still messaged as this unadulterated good uniformly positive experience by law schools, by law professors, by a legal profession. 

  

(17:34): 

And it’s really important to be honest about the challenges clerks face. I encourage everybody to consider a clerkship, though I really honestly don’t think clerking is for everybody, but it’s fine for everyone to consider it, but you got to be mindful about who you clerk for. This is a particularly important first legal job. It is the launchpad to career success or as my experience and others illustrate, it can derail your career. Judges have so much power and really we’re creating the conditions to speak candidly about the full range of clerkship experiences so that more will be positive. And for those judges who are mistreating people, which is a small portion, but it’s not insignificant, we hope the judiciary will take law clerk’s concern seriously, investigate discipline, remove from the bench the ones who are mistreating people, and then train judges better on their role as manager. And they’re running a small workplace. Yet presidents and governors do not appoint them based on their ability to manage some young employees. And that’s a real problem that creates the conditions for workplace abuse. 

  

Stephanie Everett (18:40): 

Absolutely. I think today more than ever, our profession is recognizing, I mean, how important it is that the judiciary is respected and it has an important place in our democracy. And so I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we’re talking to you and some other folks that I hope to have come on the show soon because it impacts all of us. If the public doesn’t trust and believe in our judiciary system, the whole system kind of collapses. So I think we do have a responsibility to make sure that this leg of our government is strong and secure and all the things it’s doing, including how judges are employing people. 

  

Aliza Shatzman (19:23): 

I really think we should hold judges the most powerful members of our profession to the highest ethical standards, not the lowest. And right now we really are not holding them to any ethical standards at all. Judges play an important role in our society, as you mentioned, and yet they are basically exempt from many laws, all anti-discrimination laws. It’s not just Title vii, it’s the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. So judges can refuse to hire or fire clerks rather than make accommodations for their disabilities is the age discrimination act. It is the leave act. So law clerks don’t get leave paid, family leave, maternity leave, that sort of thing. They can’t unionize, which means a short-term position, but still the judiciary is facing a reckoning right now, and it’s important that the public hold them accountable because SCOTUS gets a lot of attention. 

  

(20:21): 

SCOTUS ethics, that’s important too. Most people don’t interact with the Supreme Court, but many people will either have a state or district court federal case, they will interact with some judge at some point in their lives. And what does it say about judges when they are mistreating their own employees behind the scenes? When we think about this former judge, Joshua Kindred, an analysis of his cases found that over his five years on the bench, he dismissed I think every title claim that came before him and he was also mistreating his clerks. So there is spillover from what these judges do behind the scenes that they’re engaging in misconduct and how they treat litigants, how they treat criminal defendants. We really need to have a bigger conversation about who is being appointed to these lifetime federal appointments. 

  

Stephanie Everett (21:08): 

Absolutely. Well, I appreciate that you’re getting that conversation started. And I guess to even go into some more specifics, if people are listening right now, what is your organization doing? What does that process look like specifically and what should lawyers do if they have information to provide or want to get involved? 

  

Aliza Shatzman (21:31): 

We do all the things because there is a lot of work to be done. LAP increases transparency, accountability and diversity in clerkships and the judiciary through thought leadership, legislative advocacy and innovative legal technology. And that third bucket, legal tech has really become the hallmark of our work. We launched this year a centralized clerkship database. It’s been compared to Yelp or Glassdoor for judges. It’s an innovative and common sense legal, tech and transparency platform that democratizes judicial clerkship information. It’s basically a platform where law clerks who’ve worked for judges can review their powerful bosses anonymously if they choose after, we of course verify their identities. I know who they are, but folks reading the reviews may not. This vastly increases the breadth and candor of responses. It’s kind of modeled loosely off what some law schools, particularly the top 14 ones have historically tried to do, which is survey their alums about their experience and make that information accessible to students sometimes in an internal database. 

  

(22:37): 

Now, the problems with those are numerous. There is a real issue of veracity and candor because law schools have messaged that if you had a negative experience, don’t tell us. The responses in those internal databases are uniformly positive, making them basically useless, and they kind of ask the wrong questions. They’re not really intended to elucidate candid responses. So we ask the right questions based on what students say they want to know before clerking. Well clerks say they wish they’d known before clerking, and we pull from law clerks nationwide. We already have 1300 submissions about more than 900 federal and state judges, and we’ve been doing this platform for about a year. It’s been live for students for six months. We started collecting reviews about 15 months ago. So we are the largest independent repository of clerkship info in the us. Our database is already bigger than most top 14 law schools internal databases. 

  

(23:32): 

So if you clerked, you can share your experience with [email protected] accountability project.org anonymously if you’d like. If you are a student or a recent graduate applying for judicial clerkships, you can visit that same link to register for database access. It’s $40 for an entire year of access, and we’ve already onboarded a thousand students and Young lawyers in our first season of doing this. This has really changed the conversation around clerking. Folks who know clerkships know about LAP, and this is really the resource I wish existed as a law student and law clerk. So that is an important aspect of our work. I also write and speak about these issues a lot. I interface with law schools and law students because they have really historically been the facilitators of judicial clerkships, to be honest, based on the landscape right now, which is pretty bleak. I no longer think they should be. 

  

(24:24): 

So I’m happy for LAP to fill the gap, but we do a lot of law school programming. We’re on season five of the law school roadshow. We’ve visited more than 50 law schools over the past two years to talk about challenges. Clerks might face the questions to ask yourself and others before clerking and why you must be mindful about who you clerk for and why nobody should willingly endure abuse. And then we do some legislative advocacy around the judiciary accountability acts because our work does not wait on anybody, not the judiciary, not law schools, not Congress, though we do work with those stakeholders and their support is meaningful. There really is no solution for a legislative reform. Congress must extend Title VII protections to the federal judiciary. There is a former North Carolina federal public defender, Karen Strickland, who sued the fourth circuit after she was harassed and then retaliated against. So these issues are urgent. They are salient in the public consciousness right now. And so basically we fire on all cylinders. There’s a lot of work to do, but this is my baby. I launched this a little over two years ago. I do this and it’s challenging, but there’s a real unmet need and the positive response I get every day from law students, law clerks, many practicing attorneys and more judges in the law schools than I expected considering the accountability work we do really galvanizes me to keep going. 

  

Stephanie Everett (25:55): 

Yeah, I mean, I think some people probably think, oh, the judges must hate this. But as you said, there’s a lot of great judges out there who probably want to welcome it because they want their colleagues to be the best and to be respected. And so changing that conversation. 

  

Aliza Shatzman (26:11): 

So the response from the judiciary has been surprisingly positive and we’ve tried to engage them in a few ways. We have a judge on our board of directors and some judges on our advisory board, and they kind of help us engage with specific courts and they’re wonderful. We also initiated something called the LAP Pledge like maybe six months or a year ago, encouraging judges to circulate our post clerkship survey to their law clerk families. The response has been great. Judges are happy to, and I think most judges are generally supportive of the work because they believe that their reviews will be positive, and so they are happy for more students to learn about their chambers. I know that many judges, particularly outside the big metro areas or state judges, would like to get more and more diverse applicants. And so this kind of spotlights some judges people might not have thought to work for before. Of course, we don’t have 100% support from the judiciary, nor do we seek it. But I would say there is 100% overlap between judges who oppose our work and judges who are mistreating their clerks. Yeah. 

  

Stephanie Everett (27:17): 

What else do you feel like legal professionals should know about this topic and the work you’re doing and how they might start changing conversations? 

  

Aliza Shatzman (27:29): 

Great question. So LAP has really changed the conversation around clerking. We’ve sparked a national dialogue around judicial accountability, but clerkships I think are still perceived as overwhelmingly positive because LAP one aspect of our work that we’re still thinking through is how to spotlight more clerks negative experiences in a way that protects their anonymity if they seek it, their jobs and reputations. What I would say to anybody who still wonders how big a problem this is, well, I’d first of course point them to news stories like Joshua Kindred scandal. These recent reports about flaws in the EDR plan, Karen Strickland’s lawsuits a judge in the second circuit. Sarah Merrim was disciplined about six months ago as well for an overly harsh work environment. So these issues are salient right now. 

  

(28:27): 

More people than you think who clerked did not enjoy their experiences. Now, not everybody was harassed. Not everybody was mistreated, but whether it is judges asking you to work outrageous hours, well outside, nine to six, early mornings, late nights, weekends, that’s not acceptable. Having you engage in various non-judicial tasks like driving them around, picking up their dry cleaning, tutoring, their children, we hear about all this. Clerkships are not overwhelmingly positive. They’re generally positive, and most people will say it was overall a good experience. But I would really encourage everybody, if your experience was positive, it’s great and you should share that. But if your experience was nuanced or negative, I would really encourage you to share that too because changing the conversation starts with candor around these experiences. I still speak with clerks, former clerks will tell me behind the scenes that their experiences were negative, but they would never share that with anyone. 

  

(29:29): 

Even when students reach out seeking information about judges, they’re whitewashing the experience. We really need to spotlight more people being honest about the challenges clerks face, the challenges they faced in their own clerkships. And sadly, there’s still this kind of perception in the legal profession that maybe laps database is one tool to supplement the clerkship search. But the best tool is speaking with former clerks about their experiences. We hear from a lot of clerks who’ve shared their candid experience for the very first time in laps database. So I would really, really caution the people who think those one-on-one, connections between clerk and student are valuable. Those clerks are really not being candid about their experience. It’s hard to connect with them. We are retraumatizing these clerks when we reach out. The other really important thing to talk about is the law school piece of this. 

  

(30:25): 

Of course, judges, we understand that they are part of the problem and the solution, if they are engaging in misconduct or their colleagues are, it’s important to share that, support them, hold them accountable. We get that law schools have historically received a free pass in the conversation about judicial accountability. I’ve had a chance to do a deep dive into law school clerkship advising and resources over the past couple of years, and it is a really bleak picture. They are still messaging overwhelmingly that clerkships are uniformly positive. You should not go on an interview unless you’re prepared to accept the clerkship on the spot. You should never turn down a clerkship offer yet they are not providing candid information. Their clerkship databases are uniformly positive and misleading. Yet nobody has pointed out there could be liability here for misleading students into negative clerkship experiences. Law schools need to be held accountable. 

  

(31:29): 

And we’re not saying like Sue your law school, but we are saying if you are a student or an alum, you should demand better from your law school. And that means subscribing to this database. LAP runs our database right now as an individual subscribers model, primarily because we encountered some pushback from law schools. But this is an aspect of career services advising. Law schools should be supporting the database. They should be paying to subscribe on behalf of all of their students. And one of the missing pieces for LAP has been real groundswells of student advocacy lawyer advocacy around this. Everybody should be looking back to their law schools and asking, what are you doing to support the next generation of law students and law clerks? They are not doing enough. Perhaps they thought there was no solution and they just threw up their hands. Now, here is a solution and all we’re asking law schools to do is participate. 

  

Stephanie Everett (32:23): 

Yeah, I mean that makes sense. And as we’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking about even firms that I know that would only hire federal clerks, for example. It was a prerequisite to work because it was so sought after. So you knew if you to work for this firm that was your path and maybe it’s time to change some of those conversations as well. 

  

Aliza Shatzman (32:45): 

I was thinking about that last night. I clerked primarily because the US Attorney’s office requires one year of work experience. That is a euphemism for a clerkship expectation that is pretty standard for government, for law firms, for legal academia. And while I’m not saying we should deprioritize clerking because there’s value in learning from judges, learning from the attorneys who appear before the court, when we make it this expectation, we are necessarily sending some number of students into negative experiences because some judges are good bosses for some and not others. That’s fine. Some judges are not good bosses for anybody. They are notoriously abusive, and yet as long as they’re on the bench, they’re going to hire some clerks. So necessarily some folks are going to endure abuse in order to work at these prestigious next legal jobs. So I really encourage law firms and other legal employers to rethink the clerkship expectation or perhaps donate to a scholarship fund to support laps database for some number of aspiring clerks, aspiring law firm associates. There are a whole variety of solutions and the legal profession has historically covered their eyes and pretended there were no solutions. LAP is offering some. There are others too, but we must start talking about these challenges. The judiciary is like the third rail of the legal profession, and it shouldn’t be. Judges are above the laws they interprets and clerkships are not a uniformly positive experience, and the first step is being candid about it. 

  

Stephanie Everett (34:24): 

Absolutely. I guess one other thought I just had as we were talking that I’ll share is if you’re listening to this, you might know some people currently in clerkships maybe reach out to them and offer to mentor them or support them or help them because I’d also feel like it’s kind of an isolating position. I remember somebody I was very close to was clerking, right when we were at a law school and they didn’t have the same network of professional support that I had. I went straight into a firm and I had all these people that I could go talk to, right? If you’re just working for your judge and you have your fellow clerks, but that’s kind of it a lot of times. So a lot of work we can do there. 

  

Aliza Shatzman (35:05): 

It’s a very isolating experience. It’s either two or four clerks, maybe a judicial assistant, and you’re typically fresh out of law school and this life tenured, very powerful judge. There’s no clear place to go for support or assistance. And while there are theoretically points of contact, an EDR coordinator in your courthouse, a circuit director of workplace relations in your circuits, a chief judge in your courthouse, these folks are basically HR for the judiciary, which does not instill a lot of confidence in law clerks who are being mistreated because their questions are, how can I remain anonymous? How can my concerns remain confidential? I mean, they can’t, because if you file a complaint, of course the judge has the right to confront their accuser. The right question is, how can we protect clerks against retaliation legally and culturally? So it’s a small and isolated experience. And I would also encourage those who clerked 10, 20 years ago to think about that too. To remember that enormous power disparity that you felt when you were fresh out of law school clerk working for a life tenured judge. Of course, it’s awesome to be that close to power, but it can also be quite scary and quite imposing, especially if you are being mistreated, and especially if you feel like you can’t even confide in your co-works or your support system about it. 

  

Stephanie Everett (36:24): 

Absolutely. Well, I am excited. I mean, I’m not excited. That’s the wrong word. I’m proud of the work that you’re doing. I think you’re bringing some issues that we all need to be more aware of, more thoughtful about. It impacts all of us, even if you’re well beyond your clerkship years, it’s our profession, and all of these pieces matter and fit into the puzzle. So we’ll make sure to put in the show notes, links to all the resources that you mentioned, the database, and also for anyone who’s interested in doing more work with you, how they can get involved. 

  

Aliza Shatzman (36:59): 

Great. Thank you. 

 

 

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