Supreme Court law clerks graduate from schools like Harvard and Yale—or maybe Stanford. They land research assistant posts with the right professors. Then they burnish their resumes with a federal clerkship or two—ideally snagging a coveted spot with a circuit court judge whose proteges are known for ascending to the high court.

Except when they don't.

For every rule there's an exception, and we collected the stories of four unlikely SCOTUS clerks to provide a glimpse of how hard work, happenstance and well-placed mentors can pave a nontraditional path to the U.S. Supreme Court. Here's what they had to say.

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Patrick Strawbridge

Education: Creighton University School of Law, 2004

Supreme Court Clerkship: Clarence Thomas, 2008

Current Job: Partner at Consovoy McCarthy Park, Boston

Advice for landing a clerkship: “Don't plan your career around this, because it feels like planning to win the lottery. It's a great thing, and I don't want to discourage anyone from being ambitious. It's just a hard thing to do.”

Never underestimate the importance of sheer luck when it comes to landing a Supreme Court clerkship. As a Creighton law student, Patrick Strawbridge was fortunate to secure a sought-after spot in a weeklong seminar on the Supreme Court taught by Clarence Thomas in 2003. (Thomas teaches the small class every other year at Creighton, where his wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, graduated. He's also a devoted fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers.)

“It was absolutely terrifying,” Strawbridge said of having a sitting Supreme Court justice at the front of the classroom. “Of course you are afraid to say something wrong, which everybody does.”

But Thomas was patient and supportive of his pupils, said Strawbridge, who struck up the beginnings of a relationship with the justice. He eventually inquired about the possibility of clerking for Thomas and was told him that if he kept up his grades and followed the advice of his professors, a clerkship remained a possibility. Strawbridge knew that Thomas, more than any other justice, had a track record of looking beyond graduates of the most elite law schools when hiring clerks.

“I think he looks for people who have managed on their own to reach some success and to do well,” Strawbridge said. “I think it speaks highly of him that he's willing to look beyond the usual corners and not just assume that all the talented lawyers in America must have gone to Harvard, Yale or Stanford.”

Even so, Strawbridge understood that Creighton, currently ranked No. 120 by U.S. News & World Report, to the Supreme Court was a long shot.

Strawbridge graduated at the top of his class in 2004 and moved to his home state of Maine to clerk for Justice Howard Dana of the state's Supreme Court. He then clerked for Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit before applying for a Supreme Court clerkship.

The connection with Thomas forged years earlier, as well as the relationships Strawbridge developed with the Creighton professors who had ties to the justice and the judges for whom he worked, bore fruit. Thomas hired him as a clerk for the 2008 term. Hard work and relationships alone weren't enough to catapult him to the high court, Strawbridge said. He also needed luck.

“If you get the opportunity to take a class with a Supreme Court justice, regardless of whether you want to be a clerk or not, you should always take it,” Strawbridge said.

➤➤ SCOTUS Clerks: Who Gets the Golden Ticket? Join reporter Tony Mauro and Hogan Lovells partner Neal Katyal on Thursday, Dec. 14 for a conference call about clerk hiring and diversity. Click here for more details.

Claire Evans

Education: Rutgers Law School—Camden, 2002

Supreme Court Clerkship: Clarence Thomas, 2008

Current Job: Partner, Wiley Rein, Washington

Advice for landing a clerkship: “To the extent that you're applying from a school that does not traditionally send folks to the court, it's important to stand out academically. There's no substitute for a good GPA.”

They say it takes a village to raise a child. In Claire Evans' view, it also takes a village to produce a Supreme Court clerk.

Evans credits her 2008 clerkship with Clarence Thomas to a long list of supporters and mentors who helped along the way, starting with her first-year legal research and writing professor. That professor recognized Evans' potential and planted the seed that she could one day clerk at the Supreme Court. “She had high aspirations for me,” Evans said.

It was a somewhat audacious plan, considering that the New Jersey law school had no track record of sending graduates to the high court. Camille Andrews, an associate dean of the school, also took an interest in Evans and encouraged her to intern at a federal district court in order to strengthen her subsequent clerkship application. Evans interned for U.S. District Judge Jerome Simandle of the District of New Jersey before he hired her for a two-year clerkship after law school.

Simandle become yet another mentor to Evans and suggested that she aim for an appellate court clerkship next. Michael Chertoff, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, hired Evans as a clerk. But that position ended after four months when Chertoff became secretary of Homeland Security in early 2005.

Evans went to Washington with Chertoff, working for a time in Homeland Security's Office of General Counsel before securing a Bristow Fellowship in the Solicitor General's Office and doing a short stint in the U.S. Department of Justice's Criminal Division.

But five years out of law school, she still didn't have full appellate court clerkship experience desired by Supreme Court justices. So she applied and was chosen to clerk for Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From there, Thomas selected her as a clerk for the 2008 term.

“My path was a particularly circuitous one,” Evans said. “But none of it would have happened without the support of the school and the judges I clerked for. For me, it was vital to have the school's backing. Everyone from the dean down was 100 percent behind me, encouraging me, writing letters. That made an extraordinary difference.”

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Travis Lenkner

Education: University of Kansas School of Law, 2005

Supreme Court Clerkship: Anthony Kennedy, 2008

Current Job: Managing Director, Burford Capital, Chicago

Advice for landing a clerkship: “You have to seek out every opportunity to enhance your academic record with experiences and, frankly, references, that can attest to your bona fides. A stellar academic record, while necessary, is not enough.”

Travis Lenkner's journey to a Supreme Court clerkship started with failure. Lenkner was a standout at the University of Kansas School of Law, with top grades and a law review editor-in-chief gig on his resume. But as a third-year law student, he interviewed for but didn't land a clerkship with Deanell Tacha, then the chief judge of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

“If you were a kid doing really well at KU, Tacha was your best shot,” Lenkner recalled.

The rejection stung, but unbeknownst to Lenkner, it set off a fortuitous series of events that would eventually lead him to the nation's highest court. Without a clerkship following graduation, Lenkner landed an associate job at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, thanks to the help of then-Kansas Law dean and former Gibson Dunn lawyer Stephen McAllister.

“I did not, at the time, understand what it meant that Steve McAllister was introducing me to Seth Waxman by email, but now I do,” Lenkner said.

In addition to Supreme Court regular Waxman, Lenkner was suddenly rubbing elbows with the likes of Ted Olson, who had recently returned to the firm after serving as U.S. solicitor general, and Gibson Dunn power partner Miguel Estrada, who took the new associate under his wing.

But the dream of clerking lingered for Lenkner, and his mentors encouraged him to apply. As it happened, Estrada and others at Gibson Dunn were close with Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2006. Kavanaugh needed to staff up quickly, and at the urging of Lenkner's mentors, he hired the young associate to be in his second class of clerks, in 2007. Kavanaugh in turn recommended Lenkner to Justice Anthony Kennedy. Lenkner had no way of knowing it at the time, but Kavanaugh has since become one of the Supreme Court's most prolific clerk feeder judges, sending 33 former clerks on to the high court during his time on the bench.

Lenkner acknowledges that without the many supporters who championed him along the way, a University of Kansas graduate likely would have never caught Kennedy's eye. (Kennedy has hired just two clerks from law schools outside of U.S. News & World Report's top 20 since 2005.)

“I have no doubt that he would not have even known about me were it not for the people who made sure that he did,” Lenkner said.

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Michelle Stratton

Education: Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center

Supreme Court Clerkship: Clarence Thomas, 2011

Current Job: Of Counsel at Smyser Kaplan & Veselka, Houston

Advice for landing a clerkship: “If you're from a nontraditional school like me, top grades are even more essential. I couldn't be top 10 percent at LSU. I might have been able to be top 10 percent at Harvard and still get a look, but I had to be No. 1.”

Michelle Stratton was a relative latecomer to the federal clerkship game.

The possibility of a clerkship wasn't even on her radar during her first two years at the Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center. The school was not a traditional pipeline into federal clerkships—it had never before sent a graduate into a clerkship at the Supreme Court—and it didn't have an adviser devoted to helping students land those positions, as do most of the country's elite law school. In recognition of her top grades, the career services office encouraged her to focus on landing a job in Big Law.

In fact, it wasn't until she attended a panel discussion on clerkships at Baker Botts, where she was a summer associate in 2008, that Stratton began to understand the benefits of clerking. “They talked about the clerkship process and applications,” Stratton said. “That was the first time that I even heard how to do it. I thought, 'Well, I might try that.'”

Stratton sought out the advice of a Baker Botts partner who had clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the Supreme Court. He encouraged her and helped narrow down the lower court judges with whom she should apply. “He was the first person to say, 'Michelle, you are No. 1 in your class. You're doing fine work here. Apply. The worst they can say is no,'” she recalled.

But Judge Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit didn't say no. She hired Stratton as a clerk in 2009. Stratton then landed a yearlong Bristow Fellowship in the U.S. Solicitor General's Office thanks in part to a recommendation from then-LSU law Dean Jack Weiss, who was friendly with Elena Kagan—the solicitor general at the time.

Stratton had set her sights on the Supreme Court, and Jones and others backed her bid. Clarence Thomas hired her for the 2011 term. “Justice Thomas later joked that he hired me because Edith Jones told him he had to,” Stratton said. “There was probably a half truth in there. I'm sure her recommendation went a long way.”

LSU has since stepped up its efforts to help student secure federal clerkships, she noted. Stratton even starred in an informational video for the school on the clerkship application process.

Supreme Court law clerks graduate from schools like Harvard and Yale—or maybe Stanford. They land research assistant posts with the right professors. Then they burnish their resumes with a federal clerkship or two—ideally snagging a coveted spot with a circuit court judge whose proteges are known for ascending to the high court.

Except when they don't.

For every rule there's an exception, and we collected the stories of four unlikely SCOTUS clerks to provide a glimpse of how hard work, happenstance and well-placed mentors can pave a nontraditional path to the U.S. Supreme Court. Here's what they had to say.

|

Patrick Strawbridge

Education: Creighton University School of Law, 2004

Supreme Court Clerkship: Clarence Thomas, 2008

Current Job: Partner at Consovoy McCarthy Park, Boston

Advice for landing a clerkship: “Don't plan your career around this, because it feels like planning to win the lottery. It's a great thing, and I don't want to discourage anyone from being ambitious. It's just a hard thing to do.”

Never underestimate the importance of sheer luck when it comes to landing a Supreme Court clerkship. As a Creighton law student, Patrick Strawbridge was fortunate to secure a sought-after spot in a weeklong seminar on the Supreme Court taught by Clarence Thomas in 2003. (Thomas teaches the small class every other year at Creighton, where his wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, graduated. He's also a devoted fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers.)

“It was absolutely terrifying,” Strawbridge said of having a sitting Supreme Court justice at the front of the classroom. “Of course you are afraid to say something wrong, which everybody does.”

But Thomas was patient and supportive of his pupils, said Strawbridge, who struck up the beginnings of a relationship with the justice. He eventually inquired about the possibility of clerking for Thomas and was told him that if he kept up his grades and followed the advice of his professors, a clerkship remained a possibility. Strawbridge knew that Thomas, more than any other justice, had a track record of looking beyond graduates of the most elite law schools when hiring clerks.

“I think he looks for people who have managed on their own to reach some success and to do well,” Strawbridge said. “I think it speaks highly of him that he's willing to look beyond the usual corners and not just assume that all the talented lawyers in America must have gone to Harvard, Yale or Stanford.”

Even so, Strawbridge understood that Creighton, currently ranked No. 120 by U.S. News & World Report, to the Supreme Court was a long shot.

Strawbridge graduated at the top of his class in 2004 and moved to his home state of Maine to clerk for Justice Howard Dana of the state's Supreme Court. He then clerked for Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit before applying for a Supreme Court clerkship.

The connection with Thomas forged years earlier, as well as the relationships Strawbridge developed with the Creighton professors who had ties to the justice and the judges for whom he worked, bore fruit. Thomas hired him as a clerk for the 2008 term. Hard work and relationships alone weren't enough to catapult him to the high court, Strawbridge said. He also needed luck.

“If you get the opportunity to take a class with a Supreme Court justice, regardless of whether you want to be a clerk or not, you should always take it,” Strawbridge said.

➤➤ SCOTUS Clerks: Who Gets the Golden Ticket? Join reporter Tony Mauro and Hogan Lovells partner Neal Katyal on Thursday, Dec. 14 for a conference call about clerk hiring and diversity. Click here for more details.

Claire Evans

Education: Rutgers Law School—Camden, 2002

Supreme Court Clerkship: Clarence Thomas, 2008

Current Job: Partner, Wiley Rein, Washington

Advice for landing a clerkship: “To the extent that you're applying from a school that does not traditionally send folks to the court, it's important to stand out academically. There's no substitute for a good GPA.”

They say it takes a village to raise a child. In Claire Evans' view, it also takes a village to produce a Supreme Court clerk.

Evans credits her 2008 clerkship with Clarence Thomas to a long list of supporters and mentors who helped along the way, starting with her first-year legal research and writing professor. That professor recognized Evans' potential and planted the seed that she could one day clerk at the Supreme Court. “She had high aspirations for me,” Evans said.

It was a somewhat audacious plan, considering that the New Jersey law school had no track record of sending graduates to the high court. Camille Andrews, an associate dean of the school, also took an interest in Evans and encouraged her to intern at a federal district court in order to strengthen her subsequent clerkship application. Evans interned for U.S. District Judge Jerome Simandle of the District of New Jersey before he hired her for a two-year clerkship after law school.

Simandle become yet another mentor to Evans and suggested that she aim for an appellate court clerkship next. Michael Chertoff, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, hired Evans as a clerk. But that position ended after four months when Chertoff became secretary of Homeland Security in early 2005.

Evans went to Washington with Chertoff, working for a time in Homeland Security's Office of General Counsel before securing a Bristow Fellowship in the Solicitor General's Office and doing a short stint in the U.S. Department of Justice's Criminal Division.

But five years out of law school, she still didn't have full appellate court clerkship experience desired by Supreme Court justices. So she applied and was chosen to clerk for Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From there, Thomas selected her as a clerk for the 2008 term.

“My path was a particularly circuitous one,” Evans said. “But none of it would have happened without the support of the school and the judges I clerked for. For me, it was vital to have the school's backing. Everyone from the dean down was 100 percent behind me, encouraging me, writing letters. That made an extraordinary difference.”

|

Travis Lenkner

Education: University of Kansas School of Law, 2005

Supreme Court Clerkship: Anthony Kennedy, 2008

Current Job: Managing Director, Burford Capital, Chicago

Advice for landing a clerkship: “You have to seek out every opportunity to enhance your academic record with experiences and, frankly, references, that can attest to your bona fides. A stellar academic record, while necessary, is not enough.”

Travis Lenkner's journey to a Supreme Court clerkship started with failure. Lenkner was a standout at the University of Kansas School of Law, with top grades and a law review editor-in-chief gig on his resume. But as a third-year law student, he interviewed for but didn't land a clerkship with Deanell Tacha, then the chief judge of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

“If you were a kid doing really well at KU, Tacha was your best shot,” Lenkner recalled.

The rejection stung, but unbeknownst to Lenkner, it set off a fortuitous series of events that would eventually lead him to the nation's highest court. Without a clerkship following graduation, Lenkner landed an associate job at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, thanks to the help of then-Kansas Law dean and former Gibson Dunn lawyer Stephen McAllister.

“I did not, at the time, understand what it meant that Steve McAllister was introducing me to Seth Waxman by email, but now I do,” Lenkner said.

In addition to Supreme Court regular Waxman, Lenkner was suddenly rubbing elbows with the likes of Ted Olson, who had recently returned to the firm after serving as U.S. solicitor general, and Gibson Dunn power partner Miguel Estrada, who took the new associate under his wing.

But the dream of clerking lingered for Lenkner, and his mentors encouraged him to apply. As it happened, Estrada and others at Gibson Dunn were close with Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2006. Kavanaugh needed to staff up quickly, and at the urging of Lenkner's mentors, he hired the young associate to be in his second class of clerks, in 2007. Kavanaugh in turn recommended Lenkner to Justice Anthony Kennedy. Lenkner had no way of knowing it at the time, but Kavanaugh has since become one of the Supreme Court's most prolific clerk feeder judges, sending 33 former clerks on to the high court during his time on the bench.

Lenkner acknowledges that without the many supporters who championed him along the way, a University of Kansas graduate likely would have never caught Kennedy's eye. (Kennedy has hired just two clerks from law schools outside of U.S. News & World Report's top 20 since 2005.)

“I have no doubt that he would not have even known about me were it not for the people who made sure that he did,” Lenkner said.

|

Michelle Stratton

Education: Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center

Supreme Court Clerkship: Clarence Thomas, 2011

Current Job: Of Counsel at Smyser Kaplan & Veselka, Houston

Advice for landing a clerkship: “If you're from a nontraditional school like me, top grades are even more essential. I couldn't be top 10 percent at LSU. I might have been able to be top 10 percent at Harvard and still get a look, but I had to be No. 1.”

Michelle Stratton was a relative latecomer to the federal clerkship game.

The possibility of a clerkship wasn't even on her radar during her first two years at the Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center. The school was not a traditional pipeline into federal clerkships—it had never before sent a graduate into a clerkship at the Supreme Court—and it didn't have an adviser devoted to helping students land those positions, as do most of the country's elite law school. In recognition of her top grades, the career services office encouraged her to focus on landing a job in Big Law.

In fact, it wasn't until she attended a panel discussion on clerkships at Baker Botts, where she was a summer associate in 2008, that Stratton began to understand the benefits of clerking. “They talked about the clerkship process and applications,” Stratton said. “That was the first time that I even heard how to do it. I thought, 'Well, I might try that.'”

Stratton sought out the advice of a Baker Botts partner who had clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the Supreme Court. He encouraged her and helped narrow down the lower court judges with whom she should apply. “He was the first person to say, 'Michelle, you are No. 1 in your class. You're doing fine work here. Apply. The worst they can say is no,'” she recalled.

But Judge Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit didn't say no. She hired Stratton as a clerk in 2009. Stratton then landed a yearlong Bristow Fellowship in the U.S. Solicitor General's Office thanks in part to a recommendation from then-LSU law Dean Jack Weiss, who was friendly with Elena Kagan—the solicitor general at the time.

Stratton had set her sights on the Supreme Court, and Jones and others backed her bid. Clarence Thomas hired her for the 2011 term. “Justice Thomas later joked that he hired me because Edith Jones told him he had to,” Stratton said. “There was probably a half truth in there. I'm sure her recommendation went a long way.”

LSU has since stepped up its efforts to help student secure federal clerkships, she noted. Stratton even starred in an informational video for the school on the clerkship application process.