Proposal to let law-firm hires help state courts is dropped
Cost-saving plan had conflict issues
The state judiciary has abandoned a controversial proposal to fill coveted law clerk jobs at no cost to the government with newly hired private lawyers whose firms have pushed back their start dates because of the recession.
Robert A. Mulligan, chief justice for administration and management of the trial courts, scuttled the proposal after receiving a written opinion he had sought from the state Ethics Commission, according to Joan Kenney, a spokeswoman for the judiciary.
Kenney said in an e-mail that the commission did not provide a “definitive ruling.’’ But after Mulligan received the letter, she said, he spoke to a few of the chief justices who head trial-court departments and shelved the plan.
As a result, the seven trial-court departments across Massachusetts begin September with a considerably smaller-than-usual complement of law clerks, who help judges with legal research and drafting memoranda.
The judiciary had 105 full-time clerks in June; now, as a result of budget cuts, it will have about 75 full-time clerks and about a dozen part-time ones (most of them volunteers), said Kenney. Almost all of the full-time clerks, who earn $47,000 to $51,000 a year, have been retained for a second or third year.
Suffolk Superior Court Judge Carol S. Ball, who heads a committee that screens prospective law clerks, said the smaller contingent will make it hard for judges to do their jobs.
“I just got off the bench, and I’ve got a stack of research and writing to do,’’ Ball said late yesterday afternoon. “When am I going to do that? You might as well take away our books.’’
A clerkship is traditionally a plum job for recent law school graduates and an impressive credential on a resume. About half of the full-time law clerks in the state judiciary work in the Superior Court, where the most serious criminal and civil cases are tried. Ball said the total number of clerks is expected to shrink further once the economy turns around and they land higher-paying jobs in the private sector.
The letter sent by the Ethics Commission was not made public. A spokesman for the commission would neither confirm nor deny that Mulligan had sought an advisory opinion, saying such inquiries are confidential under state law.
Mulligan had proposed the arrangement in the spring because of two related employment trends. Tight finances had forced the state to rescind job offers it had made in December to at least 24 recent law school graduates who wanted to work as law clerks. And the bad economy had prompted some law firms to defer bringing on first-year associates at full salaries.
Many firms around the country are paying such “deferred associates’’ stipends of about $60,000, less than half their regular starting salaries of about $150,000, to hold onto them until the economy improves.
Some firms have recommended that the fledgling lawyers volunteer at nonprofit groups or engage in public service. And several local firms asked Mulligan whether their associates in waiting could perform their public service as law clerks.
Some legal specialists had said an arrangement that involves a law firm paying a judicial employee raised thorny ethical questions; firms that donate lawyers to the courts might appear to be currying favor or expect preferential treatment.
“I would think there would not only be an issue for the judge who hired the law clerk under the Code of Judicial Ethics, but an issue for the lawyer who accepted the appointment under the rules of professional conduct for lawyers,’’ Andrew L. Kaufman, vice dean for academic programming at Harvard Law School and chairman of the Massachusetts Bar Association’s ethics panel, told the Globe in June.
But Mulligan won the approval of the Committee on Judicial Ethics of the Supreme Judicial Court after he proposed a special “double blind’’ arrangement.
The Flaschner Judicial Institute, which provides continuing education to state judges, would have dealt with the law firms that supplied the clerks. Judges and court officials would have had no contact with the donating firms, and the firms would have been instructed not to identify the clerks on their websites. The clerks would have been barred from disclosing which firms were paying their stipends.
Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com 