A recommender is the term used to describe a professor or professional mentor who you plan to ask for a clerkship recommendation letter. Unsurprisingly, those same people typically end up being a reference for future jobs. So who should you ask?
Your law school has probably encouraged you to ask (1) the professors in whose classes you received the highest grades and (2) the professors with the most prestige, presuming that translates into connections to judges. I wholeheartedly disagree with this approach.
First and foremost, I have no idea why law schools think that judges have any idea who your fancy, prestigious professors are. They don’t. The ones who do know those professors personally. And trust me, if you’re in the inner-circle with that professor, she or he is already making calls to judges on your behalf.
So for the rest of us without all of that connection (trust me, I didn’t have it), who should we ask? Ask the people who know you best and who are your strongest champions. That means that you should be asking not only professors, but also people who you worked well with during your internships and who clearly want to see you succeed.
And you should never ask a professor (or not ask a professor) for a recommendation based on the grade in your class. I find it pretty ridiculous to think that it would be more helpful to have a letter from a professor in whose class you scored an A (or H at HLS) than someone in whose class you scored a B (or P at HLS). If the latter sees all of your potential regardless of your grade, then why wouldn’t that speak even more strongly to your application?
Ultimately, here’s who I asked:
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- My Civil Procedure professor who was a mentor to me and whose class I loved dearly – and who few if any judges knew;
- My Property professor in whose class I scored a P but whose office hours I regularly attended to talk about my dreams of having a civil rights career – and who no judges knew;
- My summer mentor from the Legal Assistance Foundation in Chicago, who I forged a real connection with during my summer even though he was not my assigned supervisor – and who no judges knew; and
- My LegReg professor in whose class I scored an H and who was my most prestigious of professors even though he and I did not connect – and who many of the most sought after judges knew.
I know that typically we do not get to see what our professors write about us because recommendation letters are private. My judge, however, thought it would be useful for me and my co-clerk to look at our letters, so he gave us copies and the choice to read them. I took the opportunity.
Guess whose letter was the most generic and least persuasive of the bunch: my LegReg professor’s. Which isn’t surprising. We did not get along that well! He was not my champion, nor was I his. But I thought the clerkship counseling office had to be right about this, and I was scared to mess up. (So scared that when another champion of mine actually offered to write me a letter without my asking, a rare experience to say the least, I turned him down because I already had all my letters lined up.)
And guess whose letters were glowing? The other three. The people nobody knew. And guess whose letters opened the door for me? Theirs.
I’ve been honored to have written two letters of recommendation for mentees to date. For one, my letter resulted in two follow-up calls from judges based on how glowing the letter was. And trust me, those judges had no idea who I was. It was not about my name, but about my words.
So here’s my advice to you: ask your advocates to be your recommenders, regardless of their name recognition or what grade you received in their class. Letters that are genuine, honest, and glowing are going to do far more for you than a generic letter from a well-known legal scholar with whom you don’t have a real connection. (Hint hint, that person is actually championing other students, and those glowing letters are going to be read alongside your not-so-glowing one.)