A Match Made On-Line

Computer matchmaking. Now even the federal Judiciary does it—providing you're a judge in search of a law clerk, or a law student in search of a clerkship. The Federal Law Clerk Information System, which debuted last fall, is the database accessible through the Internet that lets judges and law students—or anyone else in search of a law clerk position—find each other on-line. An individual searching for a position can go to the Judiciary's website at www.uscourts.gov and click on Employment Opportunities to find out who has clerkships, where the chambers are located, and even what the judge may be looking for in the ideal clerk. Between 1,500 and 2,000 searches are conducted daily on the site. And although some courts have developed their own websites with information about law clerk positions, the FLCIS website is the primary one-stop source of information about law clerk availability throughout the federal Judiciary. At press time, there were 533 announcements of law clerk positions on-line.

Recently the website added a few more help bells and whistles to make searches even easier. A new "Summary Reports" gives the complete run-down on available law clerk announcements by type of judge, circuit, when the clerkship is available, whether it is a career or term clerkship, and even when the announcement was added or updated. In the fiercely competitive world of federal law clerkships, this last item may be the most vital.

Suppose a student really wanted to clerk for a bankruptcy judge in the Eleventh Circuit. The chart shows eight are available. Or suppose only a law clerk position with a district court judge will do. Then there are 293 openings. And if procrastination has been a problem, 36 federal law clerk positions are still available for 2001.

Two new report pages were added to the Federal Law Clerk Information System web site. The Summary Report and Alternate Search forms will make searching for a law clerk position easier. The pages may be accessed at https://lawclerks.ao.uscourts.gov/web /jobSearch.

For prospective law clerks who know what they want, the new alternate search form may be just the thing. Select the type of judge for whom you'd like to work, the circuit, the type of clerkship, and let the system generate a list of judges to contact. It even lets the results be sorted by application deadline, dates of service, work location, or other criteria.

Judges use an internal website, and a secure password, to enter and edit their law clerk position announcements. This is the information that is posted to the public website at https://lawclerks.ao.uscourts.gov. Judges also can access an "unavailable candidate" program, a feature that lists the names of law students who have advised their law schools they have become unavailable to continue to participate in the application process. This feature is particularly useful when a judge begins to review application submissions and set up interviews. The law schools provide the information available in this segment of FLCIS. Judges may also take advantage of an added feature that makes it easy to create a position announcement indicating that a judge does not have a clerkship vacancy. This information is valuable to prospective applicants so they do not use their resources applying for a position when one is not available.