All Aboard the Clerkship

The cogs of the summer clerkship machine are well & truly in motion. Interviews have been sat, sweating hands wrenched & offers released. Many now stand at the proverbial cliff edge, preparing to navigate the Byzantine corporate landscape sprawling before them.

In the wake of this preliminary stage, I think it appropriate to reproduce an article co-written with a friend, published last year in Honi Soit:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Sydney Uni law student unfailingly forms the bane of every other student’s existence throughout the span of their academic career and beyond. Emerging from their heartland of perceived superiority, they have received their tutelage from establishments sporting the words “Grammar” and “Ladies” in their titles. Whilst incessantly blithering on about last summer’s Tuscan sun, they casually moderate the consistency of their Polo collars’ cotton-to-starch ratio. They are, quite simply, the kids you love to hate. It is perhaps in this context of self-congratulatory wankerism, dear readers, that you may derive some pleasure in witnessing how the mighty hath fallen. For while many of you “non-law” people may have recently witnessed no noticeable change in the calm exterior of your law counterparts, trouble has been a’ brewin’ beneath the murky surface. The starter gun has been fired on the summer clerkship circuit … and emotions are running high.

“So what is this summer clerkship business you speak of?” we hear you exclaim. It is a process like none other – one towards which aspiring lawyers toil for many years. The offer of an elusive summer clerkship at one of the “top-tier” law firms spells near-certain graduate employment, translating into joy, success & rapturous applause for many years to come. The successful will enjoy a life of splendour, wining & dining clients from the Hanoi office, and the eventual wasting away of winter breaks sipping cognac before an open fire in their holiday house in Aspen. The rejected will remain forever scorned & experience the sudden downfall of a barely-born career, plummeting to the grimy, soot-ridden curbs of the inner city, culminating in a lifetime’s worth of homelessness, alcohol dependency & an unrelenting stream of angst-ridden jazz poems.

An illustrious career awaits.

The sordid trials & tribulations of penultimate year law students begin with the application process. Hopes of prudence in discretion are quickly defenestrated as the firms’ HR lackeys take the reigns, making the selection process about as predictable as the fate of two nearly naked Japanese game show hosts who must race each other in a billy-cart down rocky terrain whilst their genitals are connected to their opponent’s vehicle giving them electrical shocks when they get too far behind.

But to give you some idea, the process loosely follows the lines of:

1. Submit written application informing Firm X that you have only ever aspired to work for them – a wish starting at 3 months into gestation and nurtured by mother’s bedside tales of formalistic constitutionalism;
2. Receive rejection letter from Firm X and proceed to tell your friends you’re actually relieved because you’ve heard the summer clerk program there has a bad reputation. Secretly cry yourself to sleep night after night due to said rejection, listening to the Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ on repeat.
3. Get your friend’s dad, who is a partner at Firm X, to swap your application with some fool vesting faith in meritocracy who has thankfully underestimated the strength of rampant nepotism;
4. Attend both the first and second round interviews at Firm X, both of which are conveniently performed by your friend’s dad. He secures you a clerkship in exchange for your parents lending him their yacht for the annual South-African ex-pats regatta set to take place off the Mediterranean coast next summer.

Incidentally, the allure of these legal monoliths is seemingly unquestionable. The promotional materials, with their glazed veneers, are capable of making a 100-billable-hour/week quota appear comparable to a Spanish siesta. The clerkship process may even be aptly described as the USyd law equivalent of the Berlin Wall – though it is not a gap that separates East from West, but the East(ern Suburbs) from the North (Shore). Once dismantled, the best in conservative values and soulless corporatism are united.

But despite all of the cheap tricks & hastily made long-distance phone calls, many will fail at attaining the clerkship panacea. A moment’s silence, if you will. Now think, dear readers, of your law comrades in this situation – saturated with the stench of scholastic overachievement, suffering from the rank presence of relatives in high places and reeking of a life spent in the harsh light of the upper-middle class – only now to feel the sweet sting of rejection. Place your deep-seated hatred aside for a moment, reach deep within yourselves & rummage up a morsel of sympathy for those who Mother Luck has spurned from her garden party invitation list. They are the rejected ones: lone soldiers enduring the aftermath of a euphoric rollercoaster ride, left only with the bitter aftertaste of inevitable nausea & a plethora of logo-decorated sticky notes.

This is for you – beloved law compatriots – who hath not yet felt the call-back from elusive Firm X, who even as we write, swim dizzily in the stream of disillusionment. Take the life boat of happiness that has unknowingly floated your way, for when your clerkship-endowed friends are spending endless weeks in office 14B in the private equity group, being forcibly awoken daily at 6am, you may press the snooze button & enjoy your glorious summer.

Written by Monique Cowden and Alex Wasiel, neither of whom heard back from Allens.