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Law firms pay Supreme Court clerks $400k bonuses – what are they buying?
- josaka 6y agoPrestige to justify eye watering hourly rates.
- Fogest 6y agoI'm getting a registration wall.
- pravda 6y agoDisable javascript.
- ComputerGuru 6y agohttps://archive.is/f9R8O https://archive.is/f9R8O
- timwilder 6y agoI’m sure the finding that former clerks win more is relevant - but are they controlling for the caliber of attorney? The clerks as a whole are an extremely hard working and talented subset of the legal industry and I would expect their results to also show favorably in almost any context later in their careers. It’s hard to overstate how competitive getting a scotus clerkship is.
- timwilder 6y agoOk. Read the paper, they do attempt to account for this in their confounding analysis but don’t control for it. 1. The lift is specifically strong for the judge they clerked for, and not for all of the judges 2. Federal clerks (also wildly competitive roles even if a bit less fancy) win about as much as scotus clerks from their analysis of another other data set, but don’t show some crazy single justice lift Interesting stuff
- OpticalWindows 6y ago> What are they buying? part of the system? In their profession they are equipt with a lot of power and influence because of the money and the instituiton they inhabit. They do eye watering hard work but at the same time many are questioning how the system works when it is unpopular or fails.
- b20000 6y agowho again here said engineering work pays well?
- bpodgursky 6y agoYou're comparing the top .01% of law grads to a mental ballpark of the "average" engineer salary.
- Fezzik 6y agoThis is absolutely correct. Most people who graduate from law school and pass the bar go in to middling salaried jobs. If they even practice law at all. Most entry level legal jobs pay very little compared to the top tier gigs. Said from the perspective of a lawyer ten-years into practicing.
- ls612 6y agoExactly. IIRC there are about 90k law school graduates a year and just under 40 SCOTUS clerks a year. Do the math and you get that these clerks are the top .04% of the new lawyers each year. I’ll bet the top 0.04% of engineers with a couple years experience can definitely make similar money.
- unnouinceput 6y agoThe top 0.04% engineers are probably multi-millionaires. But that doesn't detract from the fact that Lawyer together with Banker is quite a good profession financially speaking.
- bialpio 6y agoNo-one is saying they are not good, but I've read the top-level comment as implying they are better than software engineering, and after reading responses in the thread I'm not convinced that this is the case.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoIn general, I would not say that Lawyer is a good profession due to the high degree of variance. The top 10% land big law positions starting ~180k, the bottom 10% of grad are unemployed, and most of the rest make about 50-60K/yr and have 200k of debt https://data.lawschooltransparency.com/jobs/salaries/ https://data.lawschooltransparency.com/jobs/salaries/
- JustARandomGuy 6y ago> Former clerks were 16 percentage points more likely to attract the votes of the justice for whom they had worked One question I immediately have is that are they controlling for the side that the clerk argues on behalf of? I would expect clerks for "liberal" justices would probably argue on behalf of the liberal side in a SCOTUS case, and likewise for conservative leaning clerks and justices. In other words: could a liberal side of an argument (say: pro-gay-marriage) hire a former conservative-justice clerk and be more likely to have a conservative justice rule for the liberal argument?
- jskdvsksnb 6y agoJudicial methodology counts for something - see Gorsuch's recent ruling on sex discrimination. My understanding is clerks are generally so used to thinking like the justice they clerked for that they could tease out arguments which would be persuasive. Gorsuch may be socially conservative but he's obviously very susceptible to "originalist" arguments - if you want his vote, you need to speak to the text of the statute.
- notafraudster 6y agoNot sure why this comment was marked dead, so I vouched. I'm assuming an overly sensitive filter nuking comments because your account is new and the comment uses words predictive of politics? My sense, personally, is that mostly that people have the causality on legal formalism reversed: originalism is not a theory that leads to conclusions, it's a rationalization used to support conclusions already held. But at the very least what you're saying is something worth thinking about. Given that Oyez makes every supreme court oral argument public and the filings are clearly public, it seems like there probably would be a case for any number of text learning methods to try to identify formalist style in legal arguments for an analysis like this.
- nickff 6y ago>"My sense, personally, is that mostly that people have the causality on legal formalism reversed: originalism is not a theory that leads to conclusions, it's a rationalization used to support conclusions already held." I never understood this logic, because it's inconsistent with how judges & justices like Scalia often found in favor of litigants he despised, because they had a strong originalist argument. Breyer on the other hand, with his 57-factor balancing tests, always finds a way to find in favor of his favored side.
- zozin 6y agoSCOTUS clerks mostly end up doing appellate work in private practice, and a lot tend to leave after a few years to pursue academic careers. A law firm can tout that it has SCOTUS clerks within its ranks to show off to clients. Since there's only ~35 SCOTUS clerks each year, firms vying for them are willing to pay extra.
- notafraudster 6y agoThe title is a not particularly well-evidenced suggestion that firms are paying litigators for access. Rather, they are paying these people for exactly what you'd expect: they're the absolute best law students in the country and they have work experience that gives them a leg up in the toughest types of litigation the firms handle. The latter claim is much more interesting. Though obscured by the title, the purpose of the article is to cover an forthcoming PRQ study which argues that (with a credible but not iron-tight causal inference design -- basically achieving conditional ignorability through a matching estimation strategy and further adjusting for case-specific details in a pretty normal way) former clerks do much, much better at getting their former boss's vote than expected, even net of the confounders you'd expect (ideological agreement, relevant case characteristics). The article, which is open access (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1065912920948138 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/106591292094813...), is short, written in quite plain English, and has a better discussion of theoretical arguments about the revolving-door. Inside academic social science baseball: I am a tad surprised this ended up at PRQ and not, say, JOP or the APSR or even AER.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoI don't understand how you square your first paragraph with the content of that study. They aren't better based on skill within the category of cases, they're better on the cases that they have a direct social connection to. I mean even the abstract contradicts your first paragraph in plain language.
- gamblor956 6y agoSCOTUS clerks aren't the best law students in the country; they're simply the best connected law students in the country. Almost all SCOTUS clerks come from two law schools, and work for judges that went to their law schools. It is rare for a judge to select a clerk that didn't go to their own law school. The federal judiciary isn't a meritocracy. It's a pissing contest between Harvard and Yale and the sooner they lose their stranglehold on the judiciary the better it will be for everyone. So what are law firms paying for with these massive bonuses? Access, and knowledge. SCOTUS clerk almuni have access to SCOTUS judges, and knowledge of their judge's thought processes, biases, etc.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mensetmanusman 6y agotl;dr They are buying prestige for higher paying customers who think (rightly or not) that knowing the inner workings of the supreme court increases the chance a successful case.
- jagged-chisel 6y agoFormer SCOTUS Clerks. Makes it all sound much less like bribing current clerks.
- gnicholas 6y agoPart of what’s going on here is that clerks make much less money than if they had gone straight to firms. To be induced to apply to clerk, some law students need to know that there’s a big pay day at the end. Also consider that SCOTUS clerks need to spend at least a year clerking for a lower court judge beforehand, again at pay that is way under what they’d be making in a firm. Of course, some clerks don’t need the monetary motivation because clerking itself is reward enough, but for many law students it only makes sense if they can recapture earnings through a clerkship bonus. Source: I’m a former lawyer and dated a lawyer who clerked for an appellate court and interviewed for a SCOTUS clerkship.
- graeme 6y agoWouldn’t that be a problem for the court, not firms? It’s the court’s problem if they can’t hire clerks. Firms are indirectly solving the court’s problem but it doesn’t explain why they do.
- gnicholas 6y agoIt would become a problem for the courts, yes. But it doesn't because firms are happy to pay for clerkship experience. It is largely a filter and signaling device (both to the firm and to potential clients — clerkships are listed on the bios of even very senior lawyers). But in the case of appellate clerkships, there may be some networking/insight value as well.
- traek 6y agoThis explains why law students apply to clerkships, not why firms pay bonuses for former clerks.
- gnicholas 6y agoNot really. Firms want clerkships to be a valid signaling device for excellence. If there were no bonuses, then clerkships would be seen as appealing primarily to students who are more well-off, because if you have $200k in loans you don't want to take a clerkship that pays 1/3 of starting salaries firms (and less if you include bonuses). One effect of having clerkship bonuses is that clerkships become economically viable for anyone, so long as you can survive on your clerkship salary for 1-4 years.
- wallflower 6y ago> After she graduated from law school, I wrote a one-line letter of recommendation for her to Justice Antonin Scalia: “Amy Coney is the best student I ever had.” He was wise to hire her as a clerk. > I was teaching a First Amendment class at Notre Dame Law School. She was a student, just a face in the crowd. On the final exam, someone — the bluebooks were anonymous — had written an answer so impressive that I rushed to share it with one of my colleagues. This student, I said, gave a response to my own question much better than the one I had come up with myself. That student was Amy Coney. -John Garvey
- teslaberry 6y agogiant wall street lawfirm partners pull in 2m+ a year to help keep wall street bailout economics going. trillions to 'bailout' a supposedly profiteable industry. who cares if clerks are getting bonuses. how is the lawfirm capable of paying that much to begin with? the new york times is a master of fakery and nonsense and noise and distraction. yes, you can do all of those things while spewing irrelevant and red herring 'truths' all day long. here's a truth to chew on, the new york times is going to go bankrupt soon and before that happens, they will sell off that ugly excuse for a skyscraper that they had no business building to begin with. as a life long new yorker,and someone who read the paper on the subway growing up on my commute to high school, i can still say that i will not be sad to see them go. all the news that's fit to print, indeed.
- supernova87a 6y agoCan't we be happy for some people to be financially rewarded for legal / intellectual achievement in public service of justice? Rather than selling things that contribute to the decline of humanity?
- penguin_booze 6y agoA related article on London clerks: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-05-23/the-exquisitely-english-and-amazingly-lucrative-world-of-london-clerks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-05-23/the-exqui...