WaPo: SCOTUS Law Clerk Signing Bonuses Hit $500,000

Washington Post, Clerks For Hire: The Supreme Court Recruiting Race:

Only around three dozen law clerks work for the justices during each one-year term, which means these lawyers — and their unparalleled knowledge of the court — are in incredibly high demand. Jones Day, the leader in the race to recruit and hire as many clerks as possible, announced last month that it snagged 8 law clerks, all of whom worked for conservative justices during the term that began in October 2022.

But they don’t come cheap.

During the courting process, the city’s top law firms treat this elite group of lawyers to perks like an expensive dinner at the Wharf or Penn Quarter or a trip to a baseball game or spa. The recruitment is so competitive that signing bonuses for Supreme Court law clerks have reached a new high — $500,000, according to a spokeswoman for law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Such a sum far exceeds the salaries paid to the justices — the clerks’ former bosses — who are paid slightly less than $300,000 a year.

The bonuses — alongside annual starting salaries of more than $200,000, which alone are nearly triple Americans’ median household income — are the product of a decades-long competition among elite law firms seeking any advantage they can find in arguing high-profile cases before the Supreme Court. They view the clerks’ experience and knowledge of the court as profitable assets that attract clients in a highly specialized sector of the law, and they see clerkships as effective filtering devices in identifying promising hires, according to interviews with former Supreme Court clerks, lawyers and experts.

In this way, the clerks are like many former aides across Washington — whether on Capitol Hill, at regulatory agencies or in the White House — whom law firms value because of their time spent in proximity to power and relationships with influential officials.

“Their knowledge about how the court operates is invaluable,” Neal Katyal, a former acting U.S. solicitor general who co-leads Hogan Lovells’s appellate practice, said of Supreme Court clerks. “Our clients love them.”

But some critics, including at least one former justice and some former clerks, have questioned whether the clerks are worth these enormous signing bonuses — which reached six figures in the early 2000s — and whether spending millions of dollars is sustainable. ...

When former clerks return to the court years later as appellate litigators, they are 16 percent more likely than non-clerks to win the vote of the justice they clerked for when deciding a case, according to a 2020 study in Political Research Quarterly [The Influence of Personalized Knowledge at the Supreme Court: How (Some) Former Law Clerks Have the Inside Track]. The justices are also 14 percent more likely to side with their former clerk over one of their colleague’s former clerks, the study found. ...

Jones Day is leading the race to recruit and hire as many Supreme Court law clerks as possible. The firm has hired 22 clerks since the October 2020 term and 86 since the October 2011 term, according to the firm’s website.

Gibson Dunn in comparison, hired 12 clerks since the October 2020 term, while Kirkland & Ellis hired eight, according to a Washington Post survey.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• National Law Journal, SCOTUS Clerk Signing Bonuses Reach $400,000; Jones Day Hires 11 Clerks, Including Pepperdine Law Grad (Nov. 15, 2018)
• New York Times, Law Firms Pay Supreme Court Clerks $400,000 Bonuses; New Study Confirms Their Influence With Their Justice (Sept. 23, 2020)