How do you hire a law clerk? A hiring guide for law firms

At a firm, a law clerk is a law student — or a recent graduate not yet admitted to the bar — doing delegated legal work under a licensed attorney's supervision.

The work is real work: research memos, first drafts of pleadings and discovery responses, cite-checking, exhibit and hearing-binder preparation, summarizing depositions or records.

What makes it valuable is that it is self-contained enough for a supervising attorney to review efficiently.

One scope note before anything else: throughout this page, "law clerk" means the clerk your firm hires.

Courts hire their own judicial law clerks — a different job with its own hiring — and the distinction matters when you go looking for pay data in the section below.

Structure the hire around three levels.

A school-year clerk works part-time around classes and suits a steady pipeline of research and drafting.

A full-time summer clerk — some firms title the role summer associate — takes on longer projects and a controlled first look at client work.

A graduate awaiting bar results can carry more responsibility, but for pay purposes they are still unlicensed, which matters in the overtime section below.

Decide the level by the work, not the title.

Write down the recurring tasks you want off your desk, the turnaround you expect, and who reviews each product.

Put that review structure in the posting — it is the honest way to set expectations about how much client contact and independence the role actually has.

If you want the role described from the candidate's side — how students get these jobs and what they look for — our guide to what a law clerk does covers it; this page stays on the firm's side of the desk.

Hiring a clerk is also one piece of the larger work of hiring for your law firm, and the decisions below are the ones specific to this role.

None in the credential sense — and that is the defining feature of the hire.

A law clerk has not been admitted to your state's bar, so there is no bar status to verify the way there is for an attorney hire.

The credential side of the screen is enrollment itself: which law school, what year, and whether they have completed the coursework your practice area builds on.

Because they are not licensed, the lawyer's side of the work ordinarily stays with your lawyers: client advice, court appearances, signatures on filings, and settling on a client's behalf.

The exception is a state student-practice rule — California's Certified Law Student Program, for example, certifies eligible law students, and graduates who apply within 30 days of graduation, to provide legal services as its court rule permits, under an attorney's supervision.

Comment [2] to ABA Model Rule 5.5 says the definition of the practice of law varies by jurisdiction, and that the rule does not stop a lawyer from delegating functions to paraprofessionals so long as the lawyer supervises the delegated work and keeps responsibility for it — which is the division a clerkship runs on.

What a clerk may do around that line is governed by your state's unauthorized-practice-of-law rules and by the supervision duties in your state's version of ABA Model Rule 5.3 — our guide to supervising non-lawyer staff under Rule 5.3 works through those duties, and our guide to paralegal UPL risks maps the boundary for nonlawyer staff generally.

Verify enrollment directly: ask for a transcript or an enrollment verification from the registrar, and treat prior clerk experience as a claim to check with a reference who actually supervised the work.

A graduate awaiting bar results deserves a separate note — they hold a degree, not a license, so the same supervision structure applies until they are admitted.

Rules differ by state; confirm what a clerk may do where you practice with your state bar's ethics counsel before the first assignment.

Start with the law schools.

Ask each school's career services office how it accepts employer postings and when its cycle for summer roles opens.

Recruiting runs on the schools' calendar, not yours — get the dates first and plan backward from them.

Beyond the schools: your state and local bar associations, whose student sections and job boards are worth asking about; referrals from attorneys on your own roster who remember which classmates did the best work; and faculty who can point you to students serious about your practice area.

Post the role where law students already look.

The posting should say the class year you want, the hours you can actually offer during the semester, and the pay.

Compare channels in our guide to where to post law firm jobs, and look at the live law clerk jobs postings to see how other firms frame the same role.

Set the structure first.

A part-time student clerk is simplest as an hourly employee, with hours tracked and the review time your supervising attorneys spend treated as part of the cost of the hire.

The number itself is a market decision your firm owns — but the classification rules below constrain how you can structure the job, so settle them before you post a figure.

The federal overtime rules do not give this hire the lawyer's exemption.

Under 29 CFR 541.304, the professional exemption for lawyers covers an employee who holds a valid license to practice law and is actually engaged in practice — and for that employee the regulation's salary requirements do not apply.

A law clerk fits neither part: no license yet, and supervised work rather than practice.

Because the exemption keys on the license, an unlicensed law clerk — including a graduate awaiting bar results — is not exempt under 541.304 and must meet another exemption's salary and duties tests or be paid overtime.

If you test another exemption, the title on the job does not decide it: under the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet 17D, job titles do not determine exemption status — the specific duties and the salary must meet the regulations.

The federal standard salary level for the exemptions is $684 per week ($35,568 a year), the figure DOL's salary-levels page listed as of October 2026.

Your state may set its own salary level, so confirm the current figure with your state labor agency as well.

Unpaid is the arrangement to test most carefully.

DOL's Fact Sheet 71 says courts use a "primary beneficiary test" with seven factors to decide whether an intern at a for-profit employer is an employee owed minimum wage and overtime — and no single factor is determinative.

One factor the fact sheet names: whether the intern's work complements, rather than displaces, paid employees' work while giving significant educational benefits.

The unpaid arrangement DOL describes as generally permissible is at public-sector and nonprofit charitable organizations, where the intern volunteers without expecting pay — not a for-profit firm.

If your clerkship would run for course credit or academic standing instead of wages, confirm with employment counsel how the arrangement maps to the test before you post it.

One benchmark trap worth naming: BLS's wage statistics include a "judicial law clerks" occupation (SOC 23-1012), and that series covers clerks employed by the courts.

It is not a market benchmark for the law-student clerk your firm hires — our law clerk salary page carries the same judicial framing — so set the wage from your market and your caseload instead.

Classification is employment-law ground. Before you post a clerkship as unpaid, as exempt, or for course credit alone, confirm the analysis with employment counsel and your state labor agency — state rules can be stricter than the federal ones.

Screen on the work, because the work is the whole product.

Ask for a writing sample produced for a supervisor rather than a class — a memo, a motion section, a research summary — and read it for two things: whether the analysis holds up, and whether the citations check out.

A closed-universe exercise, where you hand over a fact pattern and a set of sources and ask for a short memo, shows you how the candidate argues from what exists rather than from what they wish existed.

In the interview, map availability honestly: class schedules, exam periods, and the weeks a summer clerk can actually be at your desk.

Ask them to walk through their research process on a past project — where they started, what they did when the first search failed, and how they decided they had enough.

Ask what they want to see and do during the clerkship; the answer tells you whether they understood the role they applied for.

Keep interview questions job-related, and confirm what your state's employment laws restrict asking about with employment counsel before you finalize the script.

And before the first assignment — not after — run a conflicts check covering the places the candidate has already worked: firms, government offices, judges' chambers, and legal aid or clinic work.

The conflicts rule treats this hire differently from your lawyers, and the detail is worth knowing.

Under ABA Model Rule 1.10(a), a conflict under Rules 1.7 or 1.9 of any one lawyer in a firm is imputed to all of the firm's lawyers, unless an exception applies.

Comment [4] to the rule addresses people who are not yet lawyers directly: a nonlawyer's conflict is not imputed under 1.10(a), and neither is work a person did before becoming a lawyer — work as a law student, for example — but in both cases the person ordinarily must be screened from the matter.

States treat screening differently, so confirm how your state's version of Rule 1.10 handles it with your state bar's ethics counsel.

None of these is automatically disqualifying, but more than one at once is a pattern:

• A writing sample that does not survive a citation check. If the sources do not say what the memo says they say, that failure is the whole job.
• Cannot narrate their own research. A candidate who cannot retrace how they reached an answer may be submitting work they cannot defend.
• Availability that erodes on contact. The hours a student can really work during the semester are the hours you are hiring.
• Loose talk about client information. A candidate who is casual about confidentiality in an interview will be casual with your files.
• Wants the lawyer's part of the job. Talk of running their own clients or advising clients without supervision signals a UPL problem you would be importing.
• No interest in feedback. Every product a clerk produces gets reviewed; a candidate who bristles at that structure will not enjoy the job it comes with.

Two red flags sit on your side of the desk.

A posting that promises court appearances, an independent caseload, or associate-style autonomy describes a job an uncertified law clerk cannot hold — and even a clerk certified under a state student-practice rule works under an attorney's supervision — so it recruits candidates into a mismatch.

And a clerkship posted as unpaid, or for course credit alone, deserves the primary-beneficiary analysis from the pay section before it goes live, because the volunteer arrangement the DOL describes as generally permissible covers public-sector and nonprofit charitable organizations, not for-profit firms.

Week one sets the supervision structure.

Comment [2] to ABA Model Rule 5.3 lists law student interns among the nonlawyer assistants a lawyer must instruct on ethics — especially confidentiality — so give a written confidentiality instruction in their first days, before any client work starts.

Run the conflicts screen against their prior employers before the first assignment lands, and name the lawyer who supervises each matter so that review always has an owner.

Confirm your state's supervision duties for nonlawyer staff with your state bar's ethics counsel — the details live in your state's version of the rules.

During the school year, keep a running list of the projects each clerk owns, with the status and the reviewer on it — it is the cheapest way to keep part-time hours productive across a semester.

Check in on the supervision itself: a clerk who is idle is a scheduling problem, and one who is swimming is a review problem, and the two call for different fixes.

For a summer clerk, close the loop deliberately.

Hold an end-of-summer conversation while the work is fresh, and tell the student where they stand — a return offer for next summer, an associate offer to revisit at graduation, or a clear thank-you.

A definite answer one way or the other is easier on everyone than a vague one, and it is what the next cohort hears about your firm.

When a clerk graduates and passes the bar, the obvious next hire is them: they already know your files, your drafting conventions, and your standards.

That is a campus-to-firm hire — our guide to hiring an associate attorney picks up the associate side — while hiring lateral attorneys is the playbook when you need someone already trained.

Either way, what you verify changes at admission: bar status replaces enrollment as the credential to check.

Keeping a good clerk is the same equation in miniature: work that stretches without swallowing them, review that teaches rather than only corrects, and a schedule that respects the exams on their calendar.

Handled this way, the clerkship is a pipeline your firm built on purpose.

This page is employer information, not legal advice. Rules change and states adopt the model rules with variations — confirm supervision, conflicts, classification and pay questions with your state bar's ethics counsel, employment counsel, and the agencies named above.