Entrusted with immense responsibility early in their careers, alumni who served as judicial clerks share the rewards and challenges of these coveted positions.
This story originally appeared in Lawyer, Spring 2024.
As a young girl in Saudi Arabia, Yara AlHowar ’21 felt a pull to become a lawyer.
“I noticed certain social issues affecting women during my upbringing," AlHowar said. "I saw law as a meaningful way to contribute to positive change."
Once she completed her studies at Seattle University School of Law, AlHowar had a particular path in mind that she felt would provide her with the opportunity to have an outsized impact.
“I was drawn to clerking because it’s a really powerful way to make change and be able to contribute to the justice system in a way you can’t necessarily do as an advocate,” she said.
Judicial clerks serve vital roles as judges’ assistants, helping them effectively and efficiently administer their courts. Clerks’ specific duties often include researching case law, writing memoranda, helping to draft opinions, and more.
“There is no way we could get through our case load without help from clerks,” said Judge Tana Lin with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. “The volume of motions would bring the wheels of justice to a crawl.”
While some clerkships are permanent, career-long positions, most are usually one to two years in duration.
“It’s a really good way to start your career. You get to see up-close the work of the decision-makers,” said Erin Fullner, associate dean for Student Development, who advises students as they seek out and apply for clerkships.
Most law students begin clerkships just after graduation. Federal clerkships, however, are considered prestigious enough and benefit so much from extra experience that lawyers will sometimes leave permanent positions to accept them. Lin, a federal judge, requires at least two years of work experience so her clerks “understand the real-life implications of what is happening in a case and the impact of the court’s decision.”
“The law firm will always be there, but the clerkship may not be,” said Mackenzie Taylor ’23, who clerks for the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey in Newark.
After clerking for the Washington State Court of Appeals, Division II, right out of law school, AlHowar took a position as a litigation associate with a firm. Despite this stability, she left last year to clerk for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as a visiting law clerk.
“There’s nothing that compares to clerking,” she said. “You can be an associate for five years and then clerk and still learn new things on a daily basis. Every day I grow a little bit.”
An honor with high expectations
The immense power and responsibility given to recent graduates explains the prestige and coveted nature of clerkships, explained Judge Meng Li Che ’01 of the Washington State Court of Appeals, Division II. It is often clerks who provide judges with facts and information on relevant precedents and draft initial opinions for judges to edit, sign, and issue, a much more influential role in the judicial system compared to the first jobs of most law school graduates.
“The volume of cases we have is significant, so we really have an opportunity to help shape the case law in Washington and truly impact people’s lives,” she said.
Taylor was surprised by the influence on the law she wields through her recommendations.
“These cases are affecting real people’s lives,” said Taylor, whose supervising judge hears family law and criminal cases. “In law school, everything is hypothetical.”
“The most challenging part is appreciating the amount of responsibility you have and how much a judge relies on you, your recommendations, and your research,” AlHowar added. “Operating with that knowledge can be really heavy, especially when people’s lives and businesses are on the line.”
She pointed to a case where National Public Radio (NPR) requested documents from the federal government pertaining to three friendly fire military deaths in Afghanistan.
“I was responsible for reviewing the record, researching the law — beyond what is cited in the parties’ briefs — and making a recommendation to the panel,” she said. “The panel held that the U.S. Central Command had an obligation to search additional locations reasonably likely to contain responsive documents. I feel proud of the result because we applied the law in a way to hopefully give the families of the deceased the closure they so rightfully deserve.”
Emma Wright ’20, who clerks for Lin, feels the stakes can be higher in clerking than in private practice.
“There’s a lot of pressure to get it right,” she said. “If I get a recommendation wrong, someone could go to jail. The consequences can be very serious.”
Ray Ivey ’19, who also clerked for Lin, had to manage a backlogged docket (due to years of an understaffed bench), which required working quickly and efficiently to catch up, but also deciding which cases would be heard first.
“When you’re practicing, when you file a case, that case is everything to you, but when you’re on the court side, every single case is important, and you have to look at it from the perspective of the entire docket. It was freeing but also a tremendous responsibility,” said Ivey, now an associate at Seattle’s Morgan Lewis and Bockius. “We never forgot that there were real people, real issues, real stakes tied to every single case.”
The role of research and writing
The potential for significantly impacting people’s lives is not the only source of pressure for clerks. Che noted that a judge’s chambers can be a fast-paced environment, and her expectations are high.
“A person has to be able to jump into our high caseload and not drown. The learning curve is steep,” she said. “I’m looking for individuals who are resilient, have done hard things in their life, and have been able to thrive. I’m looking for someone who is thirsty for knowledge, inquisitive, and self-motivated. You also have to be humble and not get discouraged when you get feedback on your legal writing.”
“The deadlines are pretty tight, so you’re turning out a memo once a week. In law school, we would spend a month on one,” Taylor said, noting that her memos often range from 12 to 40 pages.
That focus on writing has been an adjustment for Wright, who worked for nearly four years in complex litigation before becoming a clerk.
“In private practice, I spent every day doing a million different things, and now the day is a lot more single-minded,” she said. “It’s really different to go from two to four hours a day of research and writing to that being the only thing I do.”
Cameron Zangenehzadeh ’17 has completed three clerkships in all, spending two years at the Washington State Court of Appeals and one year each at the Washington Supreme Court and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington. The Court of Appeals proved especially busy, where he drafted a new opinion every other week and often alternated between working on criminal and civil cases.
“Getting up to speed on new areas of the law that you’re unfamiliar with is a fun challenge,” he said. “As you progress, you develop the mental dexterity to quickly switch between different subject matter areas without sacrificing quality. I learned so much in my four years of clerking—from honing my writing and legal analysis to evaluating oral argument. It was truly an invaluable experience.”
Kaelyn Tomkins ’22, who clerked in the Alaska Trial Court in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, just north of Anchorage, had to learn how to research the legal precedents of any topic at a moment’s notice.
“I would sit in on trials and take notes, give the judge my input if a legal issue came up, and would do legal research on the spot,” she described.
The law clerk alumni interviewed credit the law school’s rigorous Legal Writing Program, as well as their time working for one of the school’s four student-run law publications, for helping to prepare them for the intense amount of writing and research required of clerks.
Professor Kathryn Boling ’07, who directs the Legal Writing Program, noted that Seattle U Law requires three semesters of legal writing, more than many law schools.
“In the first year of legal writing, most of the work is objective legal analysis, where the students have to take a legal question and a set of facts, map out what both sides’ arguments will be, and figure out which side is more correct,” said Boling, who previously clerked at the Washington State Court of Appeals, Division II. “You’re doing the work of the attorneys on both sides and making a prediction of what the judge will do, which, in a way, is more than what clerks do. I think that’s why our program is so effective.”
Skills for the Future
Clerkships are building blocks for the future, another reason why they are so desirable. None of Che’s clerks has ever had trouble finding a post-clerkship job.
“We send out candidates who have a broad range of experience, and the volume of work they will touch is probably higher than what they’d touch in private practice, with a wide range of experience in many types of cases,” Che said. “Legal writing is one of the most helpful skills you can develop over time, and everyone needs it. That experience alone is worth its weight in gold.”
Tomkins utilizes the skills she developed during her clerkship daily in her position as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Pierce County.
“I use legal research a lot, especially when I have a trial or need to answer a question quickly before the court,” she said. “Having that year of doing tons of different orders, improving my stylistic approach, knowing how to build case law, from scratch, at a relatively quick speed, helped immensely.”
As a litigation associate in Stoel Rives’ Portland office, Zangenehzadeh’s practice now has a much narrower focus, but he regularly uses the valuable writing skills he acquired while clerking.
“The greatest skill I learned was how to be concise while thoroughly analyzing all of the issues,” he said. “As a new lawyer, there’s a tendency to want to ‘show your work,’ and I approached every writing assignment like I was drafting a treatise. I quickly found that was unsustainable. As I developed, I learned how to be brief but comprehensive. And that’s priceless in private practice because partners and clients are usually very busy, and their time is at a premium.”
Even clerkships completed 25 years ago, when books were the predominant means of research instead of online databases, are still valuable. Matthew Segal ’99, who clerked for Washington Supreme Court Justice Charles Johnson from 1999 to 2000, listed “certain procedural issues, the appeals process, thinking about the rules, about how to frame a good appeal argument, what’s going to be persuasive or helpful to the court” as lessons he learned that he uses now as a partner at Pacifica Law Group, and especially as a King County Superior Court judge from 2021 to 2024.
“As an advocate, lawyers need to remember to try to help the decision-maker by giving them useful and reliable information, trying to understand what the court wants and providing it to them,” he said. “It will make their job and your job easier.”
“I think what I'm most proud of is helping the judge ensure that the ends of justice were being served,” Ivey said. “That looked different in different situations, but at a high level it meant approaching each and every case with an open mind and assessing each case on its own merits. This was true whether the case involved big companies being represented by prestigious law firms, or an individual proceeding pro se.”