Benefits of Judicial Clerkships: Insights From Former US Supreme Court Clerk and Law Firm Partner
Full episode and show notes on our website: https://www.bracewell.com/resources/t...
Transcript:
There are ways that clerking has helped my career overall, but just in terms of how it's helped specifically my appellate practice, I think a couple things come to mind.
And one is writing. It made me a much better writer. The year you spend clerking, especially in an appellate court, you both get to see so many briefs. I mean, your job is to read a ton of briefs. And so you see what works, you see what doesn't work. You start to get your own preferences for what kinds of writing or what kinds of style you might have on your own when you're sort of writing briefs.
And so I think just getting to see so much is going to make you a better writer. And then in addition to that, getting to work with your judge…Judges I work for are very gifted writers. And so I learned a lot about writing just by having them edit my work and seeing that process. I think researching when you're clerking, you're busy, you're working on a lot of different kinds of cases.
And so you just get very adept at being a generalist and just jumping into a matter you've never heard of when that issue comes up in a brief and researching it and having to figure it out. And so I think it definitely has improved that. I think also other than clerking, there's no way to really see the inside of sort of how judges think.
And that really does help in practice because as lawyers, we often have to think about that question and anticipate and then make our arguments most persuasively to judges.
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