What will you actually be doing in chambers?
Most judicial interns spend the majority of their time on three tasks: researching discrete legal questions for a clerk, drafting bench memos on pending motions, and observing proceedings. A bench memo summarizes the procedural posture, states the governing standard, analyzes each argument, and recommends a disposition. In many chambers you will also draft proposed orders or opinion sections that a clerk edits and the judge rewrites.
The mix depends heavily on the court. In a federal district court, expect motions to dismiss, summary judgment, discovery disputes, and pretrial matters. In a federal magistrate judge's chambers, expect prisoner civil rights screening, social security appeals, habeas petitions, and discovery. In a court of appeals, expect appellate briefs and record review, with less live courtroom time. In a state trial court, expect much higher volume, shorter written work, and far more time in the courtroom watching calendars, pleas, and hearings. Ask before you start which of these describes your placement, because it determines what you should review.
What should you do before your first day?
Read your judge's recent work. Pull ten to fifteen of the judge's opinions from the last two years on Westlaw, Lexis, or the court's website and read them for structure, not just holdings. Notice whether the judge uses headings, how long the background section runs, whether string cites appear, whether the judge cites unpublished decisions, and how the judge signals disposition. Your goal is to produce a first draft that already matches house style.
Read the local rules and the judge's standing orders. Every federal district has local civil and criminal rules, and nearly every judge has individual practices governing page limits, courtesy copies, meet-and-confer requirements, and summary judgment procedure, including whether the court requires separate statements of undisputed material facts. Standing orders are usually posted on the court's website under the judge's name. Interns who cite the wrong page limit or miss a required statement of facts look unprepared.
Get comfortable with the docket. If you have PACER access, look at how a CM/ECF docket reads: complaint, answer, scheduling order, motion, response, reply, minute entries. You should be able to open a case file and reconstruct the procedural history in five minutes. If you cannot get PACER before you start, ask on day one; most chambers will set you up.
Finally, handle logistics: confirm your start time and building entrance, ask about the security screening and whether you can bring a personal laptop, confirm the dress code, and ask whether the court has a chambers style guide or citation manual.
Which legal standards should you know cold?
You will apply the same handful of standards repeatedly. Know them well enough to state them without looking, then find your circuit's articulation of each before you write.
For federal civil work, that means the plausibility standard of Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009); the summary judgment framework of Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, 477 U.S. 317 (1986), Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, Inc., 477 U.S. 242 (1986), and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574 (1986); and the distinction between a Rule 12(b)(1) factual attack on jurisdiction and a Rule 12(b)(6) motion. For magistrate work, know the report-and-recommendation procedure under 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1), the screening standards under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1915(e)(2) and 1915A, the deference standard in 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d), the ineffective assistance test of Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), and, for social security appeals, the five-step sequential evaluation in 20 C.F.R. § 404.1520 and the substantial-evidence standard of review.
For criminal chambers, review the Sentencing Guidelines mechanics: offense level, criminal history category, the advisory nature of the Guidelines, and the sentencing factors in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). For an appellate placement, know the standards of review cold — de novo, clear error, abuse of discretion, substantial evidence — and be able to identify which applies to each issue on appeal. Misidentifying the standard of review is the most common substantive error interns make.
How is writing for a judge different from writing for a professor?
Chambers writing is neutral, front-loaded, and candid about weakness. Put the recommendation in the first paragraph, then support it. Do not build suspense. Your reader is a clerk or judge with forty other matters pending who wants to know the answer and whether they can trust your analysis.
Be honest about the weakest point in your recommendation. Flag adverse authority, note where the record is thin, and say when a question is genuinely close. A memo that says 'the Ninth Circuit has not decided this and the district courts are split; here is the better reasoned view' is far more valuable than one that pretends the law is settled. Interns who overclaim get caught, and it destroys the trust that generates a strong recommendation letter.
Cite accurately and check every case. Read the case, not the headnote. Confirm the proposition appears in the opinion, confirm the case is good law, and note the procedural posture — a summary judgment holding does not control a motion to dismiss. Use Bluepages citation format unless the chambers style guide says otherwise, and ask early which format the judge prefers; some chambers use their own conventions, and some state courts have their own citation rules.
Verify every record citation. If you write that the plaintiff testified to a fact, cite the page and line of the deposition or the exhibit and paragraph. Judges rely on interns' record citations, and an uncorrected error can end up in a published opinion.
What are the confidentiality rules and why do they matter so much?
Everything you see and hear in chambers is confidential, indefinitely. Federal judicial employees, including interns, are subject to the Code of Conduct for Judicial Employees, which requires you to avoid disclosing confidential information received in your official capacity and to refrain from public comment on pending or impending matters. State courts have parallel rules. The obligation does not expire when your internship ends.
Practically, this means: do not discuss cases with classmates, roommates, family, or the practicing lawyer you work for next summer. Do not post about your work, even generically. Do not tell anyone how a judge is leaning or when an opinion will issue. Do not take work product home or store it on personal cloud accounts unless chambers expressly permits it. If a case involves a party connected to a firm you have interviewed with, tell the clerk or judicial assistant immediately so chambers can screen you.
Assume you cannot use anything you write in chambers as a writing sample. Bench memos and draft opinions belong to the court. Some judges will permit a heavily redacted version, and some will not permit anything; ask near the end of the internship, and accept the answer without pushing.
How do you make the internship count for a clerkship?
A judicial internship helps clerkship applications mainly through the recommendation letter and through the credibility of saying you understand chambers work. Both depend on the same thing: producing reliable written work on time, without supervision, and being easy to have in the office.
Concretely: ask for the deadline and the expected length before you start any assignment, then deliver early enough that a clerk can send it back for revisions. Accept edits without arguing. Volunteer for the unglamorous assignments — the pro se filings, the long record reviews — because those are what chambers actually needs. Ask a clerk to explain a ruling you did not follow; curiosity reads well, second-guessing does not.
Show up in the courtroom. Attend hearings, trials, and sentencings even when you are not assigned, and read the underlying filings first so you understand what you are watching. Ask the judge afterward why she ruled the way she did; most judges enjoy teaching, and those conversations are where you learn what actually persuades a court.
Before you leave, ask the judge directly whether he or she would be willing to write a strong clerkship recommendation. Ask for the letter while your work is fresh, and give your recommender your resume, transcript, a list of what you worked on, and the application deadlines. If the judge hesitates or offers a lukewarm answer, that is useful information — use someone else.
What are the mistakes that sink interns?
The failures are almost never about intelligence. They are about reliability, judgment, and reading the room.
Watch for these:
- Missing a deadline silently instead of flagging a problem two days early.
- Citing a case you did not read, or citing a headnote proposition that is not in the opinion.
- Writing an advocacy brief instead of a neutral memo — chambers needs the strongest version of both sides.
- Ignoring the judge's individual practices and local rules.
- Discussing a pending case outside chambers, including with other interns from other chambers.
- Treating the judicial assistant or courtroom deputy as less important than the clerks; they control your access and they talk to the judge.
- Dressing for a firm's business-casual policy rather than the courthouse; default to a suit until told otherwise.