Clerkship Decision Made
Well today’s been a pretty tough day. I literally spent 5 hours today sitting in my room, talking to people, thinking, reading stuff on the web, all trying to make up my mind about who to work for. In the end, I had to tell three really fantastic firms I wasn’t going to be clerking with them over summer, and the disappointment on both ends of the line was genuine. Making that call to my contact Partner at Blakes was the toughest. If only NSW was like the rest of Australia, and ran multiple month-long clerkships. Then at least I could try out more than one firm.
I’ve decided to go with Malleys, where I’ll be in the Intellectual Property and Technology practice group. Initially I was also going to be doing some work for the M&A group, but they were flexible enough to let me work 3 days a week due to space moot preparation commitments, and so, effectively being a part time clerk, it would be difficult to be involved with the two groups. Should be a terrific experience nonetheless.
I’ll also be in Beijing for two weeks in January doing a law course for uni on the Chinese Legal System. Interestingly, all firms were happy and flexible enough to give time off for this.
When I was going through the whole application process, I found scant “ground zero” information from what is normally the wellspring of info – the web. Apart from the usual corporate spiels on company websites, the only mention I found of the clerkship process from the perspective of a student were from two blogs. One in Melbourne, and the other being an ex-Perth clerk. And they were sparse on details. They didn’t even mention any firm names. Incidentally, by total coincidence I met the owner of the Perth blog at a pre-interview cocktail function of one of the firms (she moved to Sydney), and it was interesting to match up what she said there with the “anonymous” firms she mentioned on her blog.
In contrast, America has a lot of information on law firm recruitment (including the questions everyone are curious about but are otherwise unaskable – salary comparisons and so on). See, for example, the well known Greedy Associates message boards, and law.com. Even Singapore and Hong Kong have law firm goss at Icered. Australia has nothing, as far as I know.
I may write something substantial up about the clerkship application process, but in the meantime if someone stumbles across this post in the future and wants some info on the whole process, feel free to email me.
8:10pm (GMT +10.00) 
Best of luck big fella!
Interestingly, all firms were happy and flexible enough to give time off for this.
Probably because Jan is traditionally “down time” for lairms – it’s when most partners take their holidays, court cases rarely come on that quickly after Law Break, and many clients are also on holidays.
As for details in Aust of the “summer clerk” process, this may be because it hasn’t been around for as long as it has in the US. Summer clerkships just didn’t exist when I went through uni – if you wanted “work experience”, you either volunteered for a firm, or took on work as a law clerk (but that usually wasn’t just a summer thing and wasn’t arranged through the uni). On the other hand, the yank lawyers I’ve come across tell me that summer clerkships have been around for donkey’s years over there.
– OLS