Preparing for your judicial clerkship: Do this

• Read a book about writing. Don't just buy or borrow one, read it. A good example is Elements of Style. Here is another link to a strange, abbreviated version if you are really in a pinch. Sometimes, legal scholarship might make you feel like all legal writing should look a certain way but you might be wrong. Typically, your memos and opinions won't be full of florid, scholarly language. These need to be written in an accessible way. 
• Read published and unpublished opinions from the chambers you will be working with. A dozen opinions should allow you to guage the writing style of the judges.
• Practice. Read cases up through the factual background and legal standards and pause to think about what will be covered in the discussion section before continuing. Point of view is invaluable.
• Arrange lunch with someone you will be working with. You might try to meet with a staff attorney or, If you are lucky, maybe you can meet with a judge. Ask up the line to make sure you don't do something inappropriate like contact a judge directly that will be irked by your direct communication (it can be a strange world).
• Expectations as to how you perform your job as a judicial law clerk will vary depending upon the judge.    Once you start your clerkship, decisions by your judge and internal memoranda that have been prepared by past law clerks can be very helpful for understanding your Judge’s style and preferences.  If you have a co-clerk who has been working for your judge for some period of time, draw on that person’s experience as well.  Once you have exhausted these resources, talk to your judge directly if you are still unclear about what is expected as to a particular assignment.
• Read some appropriate fiction. A suggested example would be The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly. It might seem strange but it has been said that the representation of an attorney's interactions reads fairly close to reality. Many of you might think that you could just watch the movie and save some time. Let's be honest, the movie is almost never better than the book. This is the least painful of all your preparation.

While we can't point to specific resources because you probably won't be working in any specific area of law, we can provide you with some things that you should be generally familiar with before starting. This doesn't mean you need to know what's in these resources but these are the kinds of resources that attorneys and judges refer to by shorter and unofficial names. Without at least a passing awareness, ignorance can create a lot of room for embarrassment. Many times, your judge or attorney won't even know the actual name of the resource because the shortened version has become common parlance.

1. The State and Federal Codes. You should know what these look like in print form. Federal Statutes and California Statutes are a whole wall of volumes while states like New Mexico have a handful of volumes covering the entire code. Often, people will refer to subsections of the code without letting you know that they are actually talking about the code (because they assume you know it). For example, if your judge asks you to find CCP 504 or Welfare and Institutions 1432, it will be assumed that you know that the reference is to the Code of Civil Procedure or the Welfare and Institutions Code both of which are a bunch of volumes that are part of the California Codes generally. These subsection references are especially common in states with massive codes. 
2. Basic legislative history for your state statutes or federal statutes. Lower Courts may be dealing with a number of cases that are more or less settled points of law and just need to be decided. Appellate Courts are often dealing with issues that don't have a clear precedent. The method for tackling these situations will often rely on some legislative history. You don't necessarily need to learn how to do an amazing legislative history for your state or for federal statutes before your clerkship begins, but you should know the basic steps and the names of the publications that contain legislative history documents. This way, you'll know what your attorney or judge means when they refer to something like Statutes at Large, Committee Bill Files, Governor's Chaptered Bill File, etc. Assuming your court has a library, you should check with the librarians to see if they compile legislative histories or can help you compile one (just in case). 
3. The common state and/or federal treatises and what they look like in print. For instance, if you are in California and someone asks you to check a 'Rutter Guide' the common follow up question is 'what color?' All Rutter Guides have topical titles but many practicing attorneys only refer to them as Rutter Guides and know which one they are looking for by color (different colors for each topic). Similarly, you might be asked to check 'Wright & Miller.'  The treatise you are looking for is not called Wright & Miller, one of those guys is no longer alive and they were the original authors of a particular treatise for a long, long time. The treatise is actually called 'Federal Practice and Procedure' while Wright & Miller is just the common name for it.

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