Judicial Conference Votes to Curb Career Clerks

As expected, the Judicial Conference voted today to head off the pricey trend of federal judges stacking their chambers with multiple long-haul clerks. One judge, one career law clerk. That’s the new rule.

We refer you to our May post on the issue and a September story from our friends at the National Law Journal. Career clerks -- and their judges -- banded together this summer, when they caught wind of the proposed rule. Their dismay appears to have been trumped by budget concerns.

Chief Judge Thomas Hogan, chairman of the conference’s executive committee, told reporters that tens of millions of dollars would be saved over the next decade by managing the career clerk population. Currently, there are 291 career clerks, each with an annual salary of around $100,000, in chambers where another career clerk is employed. They’ll be grandfathered into the new system, of course.

The temporary -- or “term” -- clerks make anywhere from $50,000 to $80,000 a year, depending on their level of experience. Speaking of which, Hogan also touched on another trend, which we hope to explore later: Anecdotally, he said, fewer law school grads are jumping right into clerkships. Instead, they’re working for a year or two at private firms, and then applying to the courts once they’ve paid off a good hunk, if not all, of their law school loans. It’s a win-win, he said. The judges get better help, and the help gets better pay.

The judges also voted to make transcripts of federal district and bankruptcy court proceedings available on the judiciary’s online database, Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER). The transcripts will cost -- you guessed it -- 8 cents a page, but they won’t be available online until 90 days after they’ve been filed with the clerk. The idea is to protect the court reporters, whose income depends on transcript proceeds, Hogan said.

Fortunately, the conference also made it easier to circumvent the fees by agreeing to a joint pilot project with the Government Printing Office and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to provide free PACER access at 15 federal depository libraries. (The participating libraries have yet to be named, Hogan said.)

In other business, the conference voted to bump up the maximum civil penalty for employers who retaliate against employees serving on jury duty from $1,000 to $5,000, and encouraged district courts to examine how jurors are summoned in an effort to make their service less burdensome.