References Are Pretty Important If You Want To Snag A Clerkship

So… you all seem to like clerkship content.  Last week’s column resulted in a good amount of positive feedback, including a link in the D.C. Bar Daily Legal Brief, which granted, isn’t a recurring role on All in with Chris Hayes like some of the other voices you will find here on Above the Law, but we all have to start somewhere.  And if the person/bot who drafts the D.C. Bar email is reading this, I just paid my yearly dues, so calm down with the reminder emails.

To follow up on the clerkship talk from last week, this week’s column is going to be dedicated to *checks notes* references.

While this might seem like a disconnect, I assure you that it is not.  Whether applying for a clerkship or an attorney position in private practice, in-house, public service, or even the government, at some point you will need others to speak on your behalf about your abilities.  For clerkships in particular, applicants will need longer letters of recommendation, but the thought process in picking recommenders is similar to that of picking references.  Here are some things to consider when thinking about references.

The first question you want to tackle is how many references you need.  The answer is that you want to provide a couple, with my experience being that the magic number is three.  Listing a single reference makes you seem like a creepy loner who has literally one friend and likes to fly kites at night.

Conversely, listing a dozen references makes it seem as if you lack the wherewithal to actually edit your life down and discern between people able to speak honestly about your ability and those who just happen to know you.  Three references provides you with the opportunity to have a mix of both personal and professional while limiting your list to those best positioned to speak on your behalf.

And yes, references should include personal references as well as professional ones.  While all employers want to know that a candidate can do the legal work that is required in the position, that still leaves a large number of qualified candidates.  Most Biglaw firms could pluck a student at random from the top 25 or so law schools and that individual would be a competent junior associate.  What employers want in addition to legal acumen, is a colleague they will actually like, or at the very least not loath.  Having someone who can speak about you as a person, in a professional manner — this is not the place to list your mom — can truly help you stand out.  As an example, my personal reference is a former graduate school classmate who is now a minister.  Top that.

When it comes to selecting professional references, the obvious answer is former co-workers or supervisors.  But not everyone has a robust professional career from which to draw references.  For those of you reading this who are still in law school, your professors can serve as professional references, but there are a few things of which you need to be careful.  First, make sure the professor whom you are asking to serve as a reference actually knows you.  If you are a 3L sending out applications and your first-year Civil Procedure professor is listed, despite the fact you spoke only twice in class and never since, even if you got an A in the class, that recommendation is doomed to be limited at best.  Instead, if you think you might want a professor to serve as a reference, go drop into office hours and develop some sort of a relationship.  Consider working as a research assistant.  Do anything that will allow this professor to say something more about you than your grade in the class and that you seemed to understand International Shoe.

Second, and this goes for all references, ask for permission before listing someone as a reference.  Do not assume that just because you got the highest grade in the class, your professor is going to be willing to serve as a reference; because while it is entirely likely that they will be willing to, the fact that you made such an assumption and did not provide them with the courtesy of seeking their permission can turn a positive reference into a negative one in a moment.

Third, use full titles for everyone, but especially your professors.  Yes, some members of the legal academy have titles that sound more like the name of a mid-December college football bowl game than something befitting a tenured faculty member — you cannot tell me the Beef O’Brady’s Chair in Hospitality Law sounds so ludicrous that, without looking it up, you would be able to say there is not at least a 5 percent chance it exists — but they have worked remarkably hard for their accomplishments and to lump them all together as “professor” undermines their life’s work.

I will mention here as well that just because you use one set of professors (or other professional references) for a particular application does not mean you are bound to use that same list for all other job opportunities for the rest of your career.  If you have a professor willing to serve as a reference who clerked for the particular judge to whom you are applying or used to work at the same firm where you want to practice, you should definitely list them.  Whether that means expanding your reference list to four or replacing your weakest reference is up to you.

Once you have established who to list as a reference and how to list them, the final step is where to list them.  Earlier on in this column’s run, when discussing résumés, I said that “[r]eferences can probably be on a separate page, but if you are a 1L looking to fill up space, go ahead and include it on the main document,” and that advice remains true.  For the most part (again, clerkships are a separate situation), an employer is not going to be interested in your references until you well into the hiring process.  The reason is simply because references can be hard to get a hold of and an employer would rather have to do that for one or two candidates, as opposed to 25.  So while you should always have a list of references ready to go, do not feel obligated to include it in every application packet.  And no, you do not need to say “reference available upon request,” because that’s implicit in every application.  It is not as if an employer is going to ask you for reference and your response is going to be…

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Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at [email protected].