A judicial ethics panel has looked at the increasingly common arrangement of a law student cashing a Biglaw check while working, unpaid, inside a judge’s chambers and decided it is all perfectly fine.
In the race to lock up talent earlier and earlier, Biglaw firms including Davis Polk, Milbank, Simpson Thacher, and Latham have taken to handing 1Ls $25,000 to $50,000 to commit to a 2L summer spot. This allows the student to pursue unpaid public interest internships without having to take an economic hit. The ethical quandary comes in when the student goes to (unpaid) work for a judge.
The U.S. Judicial Conference’s Committee signed off on the practice in Opinion 119. The panel’s blessing rests on three conditions: the money can’t be “tied in any way” to the intern’s judicial service, the intern has to recuse from any case involving the firm cutting the checks, and the payment has to be disclosed.
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While all this is nice for the students who want to notch some public interest experience without having to live like it, it should still be seen within the context of a Biglaw recruitment system that is well and truly broken. Ever since 2018, when NALP announced it was eliminating the recruitment guardrails, the race to the bottom was on. Eight years later, it’s awful out there. Major law firms are peacing out of on-campus recruitment while law students have taken up the recruitment mantle. 1Ls are securing their 2L summer jobs *before* their 1L summer jobs. Offers for summer associate jobs that explode before the first year of law school is even over have become a thing. It’s madness and exactly no one knows how to pull the industry back from the brink.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1