Clerkship Application Manager (CAM)
Clerkships are important for the careers of law school students, as well as for the judges they serve.
A judicial clerkship is typically a one- or two-year position in the chambers of a judge. A judicial clerk serves, in essence, as a judge's personal attorney, and judges typically place an enormous amount of reliance on the counsel of their clerks. Clerks, therefore, have great responsibility, and enjoy an unparalleled opportunity for learning.
The clerkship application process is an extensive and time-consuming one. It involves many parties, completing many different phases of the process—faculty recommendations, processing by the Stanford Law School, sending the application to judges, conducting interviews, and then of course, the clerkship itself (no small potatoes there!). The Standard OSCAR application was not providing enough features for SLS... Enter Fibonacci Web Studio! We worked with the Stanford Law School team to build an application that would optimize this complicated process for SLS administrators, as well as students. And of course, we couldn't resist adding some data analysis and visualization ;)
The different audiences for this project had very specific needs, and we worked to optimize the process for all parties. This is no small task when parties range from administrators to students to faculty members!
The process starts with students, who request recommendations from faculty (the Program Coordinator then manages all letter of recommendation requests). Then the student is able to select from among over 4,000 judges to apply for the clerkship that they want the most... (the site won't cross your fingers for you, but we'll wish you luck anyway!) Then the judge and their team take over for interviews and hiring.
With almost the totality of the clerkship application process taking place and being documented within one location, this creates an awesome opportunity to analyze hiring patterns... something the office of career services was definitely excited about. By implementing some of our data visualization expertise, we enabled real-time analysis by administrators of how judges are hiring clerks. This will allow them to optimize even further in getting the right fit of students into clerkships. Talk about a win-win!