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Judicial law clerks

Also called Judicial clerk, Law clerk, Federal law clerk, Federal clerk, Appellate law clerk

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 13,290 US judicial law clerks, with median pay of $64,920 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2012, the highest was 16,630, in May 2019. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 9 from 1919, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for judicial law clerks: Westlaw Precision and Lexis Advance, 2012 to 2023.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2.8% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Judicial law clerks: jobs and pay since 1919 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/23-1012

Chicago

Future History. "Judicial law clerks: jobs and pay since 1919." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/23-1012.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_23_1012, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Judicial law clerks: jobs and pay since 1919}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/23-1012}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
19001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Law Secretary / Secretary to the Justice (personally funded, pre-Congressional authorization)
Known then as Law Clerk (Supreme Court and circuit courts; district courts not yet authorized)
Known then as Law Clerk (all federal court levels authorized; certificate of need required for district courts)
Known then as Judicial Law Clerk (federal and state courts; permanent career clerks emerge alongside term clerks)
Known then as Judicial Law Clerks (BLS SOC 23-1012)
Known today as Judicial Law Clerks (BLS SOC 23-1012)
Projected to still be called Judicial Law Clerks (BLS SOC 23-1012)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
13K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$64,920
Est.

≈ $63,256 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1882

Justice Horace Gray joins the Supreme Court and hires the first dedicated law clerk -- a Harvard Law graduate -- out of his own personal funds. Congress has not yet appropriated money for legally trained judicial assistants; Gray pays from his own salary. He calls the position his "secretary." Gray's innovation addresses a concrete problem: the Supreme Court's docket exceeds 1,500 cases annually with no intermediate appellate buffer. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. will adopt the same practice when he joins the Court in 1902, relying on recommendations from Felix Frankfurter at Harvard.

Beat · 1891

Congress passes the Judiciary Act of 1891, creating the circuit courts of appeals and dramatically reducing the Supreme Court's caseload. The docket relief reduces the pressure that drove Gray's original clerk innovation -- but the practice has already taken hold, and the new intermediate appellate courts will eventually need their own clerks. The 1891 act is the structural reform that makes the federal court system manageable without a massive expansion of Supreme Court justices.

Beat · 1919

Congress formally authorizes and funds "legally trained assistants" for Supreme Court justices, designating them "law clerks" to distinguish them from the stenographers it had been funding since 1886. This is the first Congressional recognition that judicial law clerks are a distinct, legally trained class of staff -- not secretarial support. The Judiciary pays for legally trained assistants for the first time in American history, 37 years after Gray's personal funding began the practice.

Beat · 1930

Congress authorizes circuit court of appeals judges to appoint law clerks for the first time. The practice had already spread informally to some circuit judges, but federal funding and formal authorization now makes it universal across the intermediate appellate tier. Six years later in 1936, district court judges receive the same authorization -- but with a certificate of need requirement from the senior circuit judge, capped at 35 positions nationally in the first year.

Beat · 1959

Congress removes the certificate of need requirement for district court law clerks, allowing federal judges to hire "necessary" clerks within their chambers staff budgets. The Judicial Salary Plan provides minimum salary provisions. This legislative change opens the floodgates for a significant expansion of law clerk positions across the federal district court system -- the single largest expansion of the role in the post-World War II era.

Beat · 1973

LexisNexis publicly launches LEXIS on April 2, 1973, with New York and Ohio case law libraries plus federal tax materials. The UBIQ terminal allows lawyers and clerks to search case law online for the first time. Westlaw follows in 1975 as the West Automated Law Terminal. For judicial law clerks, computerized legal research transforms the research workflow: case law surveys that previously required a half-day of physical digest work can now be completed in minutes with a Boolean search. The productivity shift increases the volume of research a single clerk can deliver per term.

Beat · 1980

Congress authorizes Supreme Court justices to employ as many as four law clerks each. Most associate justices had employed two clerks through the 1946-1969 terms and three from 1970 onward. The four-clerk expansion reflects the Supreme Court's growing docket of discretionary certiorari petitions, which had reached thousands of petitions per term. The cert pool -- an arrangement by which clerks from multiple chambers collectively review petitions and circulate memos -- had by this point become a de facto institution, though not all justices participated.

Beat · 2023

In May 2023, attorney Steven Schwartz files a brief in Mata v. Avianca citing six nonexistent cases fabricated by ChatGPT. Judge P. Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York dismisses the case and sanctions Schwartz $5,000, describing one AI-generated "legal analysis" as "gibberish." The case becomes the first widely covered example of LLM hallucination causing direct legal consequences in a federal court and triggers a cascade: Judge Brantley Starr of the Northern District of Texas issues the first AI standing order within months, requiring counsel to certify AI-generated content has been verified by a human. By late 2025, over 30 federal districts have issued AI disclosure local rules. For judicial law clerks, the Mata fallout creates a new compliance function: monitoring whether parties' filings comply with the court's AI certification requirements and ensuring chambers' own AI-assisted workflows meet the same standards.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace judicial law clerks? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+2.8%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 23-1012 (Judicial law clerks): 14.0 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 14.4 thousand in 2035, a change of +0.4 thousand (+2.8%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers. The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
44.8%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 23-1012.00 Judicial Law Clerks. Shown: human-rated β = 0.448, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.897; GPT-4-rated β 0.517. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for judicial law clerks

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereConduct AI-assisted multi-jurisdictional case law surveys for pending matters using CoCounsel Deep Research, Lexis+ Protégé, or Westlaw Precision AI

Conduct AI-assisted multi-jurisdictional case law surveys for pending matters using CoCounsel Deep Research, Lexis+ Protégé, or Westlaw Precision AI; direct research queries with structured prompts specifying jurisdiction, date range, and binding-vs.-persuasive precedent hierarchy; verify every AI-surfaced citation via Shepard's or KeyCite before including in any bench memo or opinion draft; synthesize into a research memorandum with annotated precedent hierarchy.[6],[5],[3]

Where your edge is

Master structured legal research prompting: specify the circuit, date range, standard of review, and the specific legal question in every query. AI tools surface citations in minutes but hallucinate at 17-33% rates (Magesh JELS 2025): build a personal Shepard's verification checklist and document every citation you checked before submitting a bench memo. The clerk who consistently catches AI hallucinations is the one the judge trusts with high-stakes motions.

AI is sitting alongside you herePrepare bench memoranda for pending motions and appeals: use AI brief-analysis tools (Harvey, CoCounsel) to generate structural summaries of each party's arguments and the governing legal standard

Prepare bench memoranda for pending motions and appeals: use AI brief-analysis tools (Harvey, CoCounsel) to generate structural summaries of each party's arguments and the governing legal standard; review AI-generated summaries against the actual filed briefs to catch mischaracterizations and omissions; draft the recommendation section based on independent legal analysis; verify all cited authorities against Shepard's before submitting to the judge.[12],[9],[3]

Where your edge is

Use AI brief summaries as a reading guide, not a substitute for reading the briefs. The recommendation section of the bench memo, the part the judge relies on most, must reflect your own independent analysis. AI summaries frequently omit the losing party's strongest argument; always read the actual brief to identify it. Your reputation with the judge is built on memo quality, not speed.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDraft judicial opinions and orders under the judge's direction: use AI drafting tools (Harvey, CoCounsel) to produce structural frameworks organized by legal issue with cited authorities

Draft judicial opinions and orders under the judge's direction: use AI drafting tools (Harvey, CoCounsel) to produce structural frameworks organized by legal issue with cited authorities; develop the fact section from the record; write the legal analysis section applying the governing standard to the case-specific facts using independent legal reasoning; verify every citation independently before submitting the draft to the judge for review and revision.[10],[11],[5]

Where your edge is

Treat AI opinion frameworks as organizational scaffolding, not legal reasoning. The fact-specific application, why this case comes out this way under this standard on these facts, must be your own analysis. Build an opinion verification checklist: every cited case Shepard's-checked, every record cite page-pinned, every statutory quote pulled from official text. One AI hallucination in a published opinion creates appellate vulnerability and damages the judge's reputation.

Where judicial law clerks go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Lawyers

The judicial clerkship to BigLaw or government attorney pipeline is the standard post-clerkship career path and the one employers overwhelmingly expect. The AI legal research and bench memo skills clerks develop during their term map directly onto the work product attorneys produce: AI-assisted legal research, brief analysis, opinion drafting, and citation verification are identical tasks in both settings. Clerks who built chambers AI workflows are specifically sought by the AI-specialty practice groups that grew 106% YoY in lateral hiring.

What you'd add
  • · Client development and business development basics (not required in chambers)
  • · Billable hour management and matter management systems (Aderant, 3E, Thomson Reuters Elite)
  • · Litigation advocacy skills: brief writing under deadlines, deposition preparation, oral argument
  • · Practice-area substantive depth (choose a specialty: IP, securities, antitrust, health care)
What it takesMost of your skills carry over
Tools of the era

How has the work of judicial law clerks changed since 1882?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Manual research: digests, reporters, and card indices

    The earliest judicial law clerks worked with physical law libraries containing bound reporters and digests. The American Digest System, developed by West Publishing beginning in the 1870s, organized all American case law into subject headings using a Key Number classification system. A clerk researching a legal question would consult the digest, locate relevant headings, pull the corresponding reporters from the shelves, read the cases, and take handwritten or typewritten notes. The process was slow, linear, and required physical proximity to a well-stocked court library. Bench memos and opinion drafts were handwritten or typed on a typewriter; a clerk who made extensive revisions retyped the document from scratch.

  • Typewriter and expanded digest system (standardized chambers workflow)

    By the 1930s the typewriter was standard in judicial chambers, transforming how bench memos and opinion drafts were produced. Chambers developed formalized workflow patterns: the clerk drafted on the typewriter, the judge edited by hand on the typed draft, and the clerk retyped clean copies. The West Digest system expanded through this era to cover the growing body of federal and state case law, and law school libraries became sophisticated enough that clerks could train themselves on research methodology before entering chambers. Clerks at the Supreme Court level began to acquire a reputation in this era as unusually influential: Justice Louis Brandeis, who served until 1939, treated his clerks as genuine intellectual partners, a model that spread slowly across the federal judiciary.

  • Computerized legal research: LEXIS (1973) and Westlaw (1975)

    On April 2, 1973, MDC launched LEXIS at a press conference in New York City, with libraries of New York and Ohio case law and federal tax materials. LexisNexis created the UBIQ terminal to let lawyers search case law online, and the system was extended to federal courts by the mid-1970s. Westlaw launched in 1975 as the West Automated Law Terminal; by January 1978 it had transitioned to full-text retrieval of case law. For judicial law clerks, computerized research was transformational: a task that previously required a half-day of physical digest work could be completed in minutes with a Boolean search. The clerk's value shifted from breadth of research (finding everything relevant) toward depth of analysis (evaluating what the research means for the specific legal question). The two-database duopoly -- LEXIS and Westlaw -- remained the defining research infrastructure for judicial chambers for three decades.

    Effect on the work

    Computerized legal research compressed the time required for case law surveys from days to hours, increasing the volume of motions a clerk could handle per term. Courts with multiple clerks per judge were able to take on heavier dockets. The productivity gain did not reduce clerk headcount; it increased the substantive quality and scope of legal research products a single clerk could deliver.

  • Word processing, CM/ECF electronic docketing, and internet-accessible legal research

    The transition from typewriters to personal computers running Microsoft Word transformed bench memo and opinion drafting. Revisions no longer required retyping; tracking changes between draft versions became standard. The federal courts' CM/ECF (Case Management/Electronic Case Files) system, rolled out nationally in the early 2000s, made all filed documents accessible electronically in chambers rather than requiring paper file retrieval from the clerk's office. Law clerks could now pull the original brief, the response, the reply, and all supporting exhibits from their desk without leaving chambers. Westlaw and LexisNexis moved to web-based interfaces during this period, further lowering the friction of research. The cumulative effect of these changes made the term clerk's output volume substantially higher than it had been in the typewriter era.

  • Westlaw Precision and Lexis Advance (AI-assisted case law filtering)

    Thomson Reuters launched WestSearch (predecessor to Westlaw Precision) in 2012, incorporating natural language query capability and AI-ranked relevance scoring on top of the existing Boolean search foundation. LexisNexis followed with Lexis Advance. These platforms did not change the fundamental research methodology clerks used but reduced the time required to surface the most relevant precedents within a large result set. The AI-ranked results sorted by editorial relevance rather than pure citation frequency, helping clerks identify the leading cases in a circuit split more quickly. Shepard's and KeyCite, the two citator services, also became more integrated into the research workflow, with one-click validation of whether a cited case remained good law. These tools incremented rather than transformed the research workflow.

  • Generative AI legal research and drafting (Harvey, CoCounsel, Lexis+ Protege)

    The Mata v. Avianca case (May 2023), where a lawyer filed a brief citing six nonexistent AI-generated cases and was sanctioned, accelerated the adoption of standing orders on AI disclosure across many federal districts by late 2025 -- creating a new compliance monitoring function for clerks in chambers. Thomson Reuters launched CoCounsel with Deep Research in August 2025, executing multi-step legal research using Westlaw and Practical Law in parallel and producing research memos with verified citations. LexisNexis released Lexis+ with Protege in February 2026, providing hundreds of ready-to-use legal workflows with Shepard's Verify Trust Markers for AI citation checking. The Federal Judicial Center's own 2025 guidance actively encourages clerk adoption of AI research tools to reduce chambers docket backlogs. However, Magesh et al. in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (2025) found 17-33% hallucination rates in the specific tools deployed in chambers: every AI-generated citation requires independent Shepard's or KeyCite verification before appearing in a bench memo or opinion draft. The clerk's value has shifted again: from sourcing research to auditing it.

    Effect on the work

    AI legal research tools compress multi-step case law surveys from hours to minutes. The Federal Judicial Center estimates chambers using AI research tools can process heavier motions dockets without additional clerk headcount. The net employment effect has not reduced clerk positions as of 2025-26: the verification requirement and the judicial oversight function are absorbing the time savings.

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Judicial Law Clerks employment and pay by year

On record since1882
Latest US employment13,290 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$64,920 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+2.8% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 22 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
19199n/aEst., Federal Judicial Center Researched contextReport
193653n/aEst., Federal Judicial Center Researched contextReport
1968n/a$9,000Est., FRASER / BLS Researched contextReport
1990n/a$30,000Est., Congressional Research Service Researched contextReport
19983,598n/aEst., NALP Researched contextReport
2000n/a$42,000Est., US Courts Researched contextReport
201025,150$39,780BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201118,300$42,450BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201211,200$47,120BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201310,890$47,640BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201411,660$48,640BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201512,660$50,740BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201613,410$51,760BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201715,260$51,330BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201816,350$53,540BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201916,630$54,010BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202014,690$57,510BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202114,800$50,750BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202215,540$57,490BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202314,680$57,490BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202413,220$60,400BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202513,290$64,920BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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