A law clerk at a law firm is a law student — or a graduate who has not yet been admitted — doing supervised legal work for the firm's attorneys: researching issues, drafting memoranda, reviewing documents and helping assemble filings.
This page covers the seat's two schedules — part-time work during the school year and the summer program track — and what the work involves, what it pays, what you cannot do before admission, and how the seat turns into an associate offer.
Typical tasks for a firm law clerk
Walk into a law office and the law clerk's desk is where the preparatory work happens: assignments come in from the attorneys, and finished, checked drafts go back.
The through-line is that an unorganized legal question goes in and written analysis a lawyer can check and use comes out.
- Legal research across statutes, cases and secondary sources
- Research memoranda for supervising attorneys
- Cite-checking and proofing briefs and court filings
- Document review and discovery support
- Assembling exhibits, deposition binders and filing sets
- Drafting support on correspondence, agreements and court papers
Two sourced anchors mark how the seat is treated.
In Missouri v.
Jenkins (1989), the Supreme Court held that fee awards under 42 U.S.C.
1988 may compensate paralegal and law clerk work at market rates rather than at the firm's cost — in those fee awards, clerk time is a compensable line item, not an informal extra pair of hands.
And the seat's treatment in the federal pay rules turns on licensure rather than the title, which is why the comparison with the paralegal role is a real question and not a naming dispute.
That task-by-task split is the law clerk vs paralegal guide's subject.
The sources behind this page document the title's pay and licensing treatment rather than an official task list, so read the list above as the shape of the supervised student job.
One disambiguation: BLS counts judicial law clerks — the court version of the title — as their own occupation, SOC 23-1012; this page is the firm version, and our law clerk guide covers how all the versions of the title fit together.
Part-time during school vs summer
The two schedules this page separates are also two different arrangements.
A semester seat is the part-time version: the same supervised research and drafting, fitted around classes.
In the summer the seat can go full time — and where a firm runs a formal program, that structured summer is a track of its own, covered in our summer associates guide.
Pay in the summer track is documented: NALP's 2025 survey put the median weekly salary for second-year summer associates at $3,850 across all firms, and $4,100 at firms of more than 700 lawyers.
Those figures describe the structured summer program; a part-time semester seat is its own arrangement, and the posting is where its rate shows up.
Whether a clerk seat can be unpaid is its own question, and the setting decides it.
DOL's Fact Sheet 71 says courts use a seven-factor "primary beneficiary test" to decide whether an intern at a for-profit employer is an employee owed minimum wage and overtime, with no single factor decisive.
One factor asks whether the intern's work complements rather than displaces paid employees' work while giving significant educational benefits.
In the public sector and at nonprofit charitable organizations, DOL says unpaid arrangements where the intern volunteers without expecting pay are generally permissible.
What you can't do before admission
Licensure is the line.
The clearest marker in our research is D.C.'s: the commentary to D.C. Rule 49 says law clerks, paralegals and summer associates are not practicing law if they do not advise clients or hold themselves out as authorized or competent to practice law.
That is D.C.'s commentary, and other states write their own.
Two ABA Model Rules — models that states adopt in their own versions — frame the rest.
Rule 5.5(b)(2) bars a lawyer who is not admitted in a jurisdiction from holding out or representing that they are admitted there, which matters for a graduate waiting on admission.
Rule 5.5(a) bars a lawyer from practicing law in violation of a jurisdiction's regulation of the profession or assisting another in doing so — the supervising firm's exposure if a clerk's work crosses the line.
The federal overtime rules draw their own version of the line.
The practicing-lawyer exemption (29 CFR 541.304) covers an employee holding a valid license to practice law who is actually engaged in practice — and for that lawyer the exemption's salary requirements do not apply.
An unlicensed law clerk is not that person, and neither is a law graduate waiting on bar results: both fall outside the exemption and must meet another exemption's salary and duties tests or be paid overtime.
If another exemption is the argument, the federal standard salary level is $684 a week ($35,568 a year) as of October 2026.
Titles settle nothing here — DOL is explicit that job titles do not determine exemption status; the duties and the salary must meet the regulations.
Nonlawyer status also shapes the money.
ABA Model Rule 5.4(a) — a model rule that states adopt in their own versions — bars a lawyer or law firm from sharing legal fees with a nonlawyer.
The model rule's exceptions let a firm include nonlawyer employees in a compensation or retirement plan based in whole or in part on profit-sharing, which is a wage plan, not a per-case cut.
Practice boundaries are state rules
How clerking leads to an associate offer
A clerk seat is a working audition.
The memos and drafts you hand back give a hiring decision real evidence to read: assignments from the firm's matters, real deadlines, and attorneys who can speak to your work from experience.
Make the evidence count.
Ask what a strong memo would have done differently when one comes back marked up.
Take the next assignment when it is offered, and ask for one when it is not.
When the term ends, keep the relationships alive — the attorneys you supported are the references your later applications lean on, whether you apply to the same firm or a different one.
The structured version of this pipeline — the formal summer program — is the summer associates guide's territory.
A semester clerkship feeds the same destination from the school-year side: it builds the writing sample, the references and the firm familiarity that a summer or post-graduation application needs.
Where to find law clerk jobs
Firm clerk openings surface through your law school's career services office, through firms' own career pages, and through job boards that collect legal postings.
Our law clerk jobs page gathers law firm clerk openings in one place, and the posting is where the schedule and the arrangement show up — part-time or summer, office-based or remote or hybrid where an employer offers it.
Read the substance of each posting rather than the label: supervised student seats go by more than one title — law clerk, summer law clerk and summer associate among them — and the posting's details, not the label, tell you the schedule.
Career information, not legal advice. The overtime and internship rules described here are U.S. Department of Labor regulations, and admission and practice rules are state rules — confirm how they apply to a specific job with the DOL's Wage and Hour Division or the bar admission authority in your state.