While the rest of the legal universe recognizes the scope and scale of the pandemic and have responded with work from home policies and virtual hearings, there are federal judges out there firing clerks for being unwilling to huddle in chambers.
To be sure, judges could run their chambers like the NBA bubble by holding themselves to a tight quarantine and keeping clerks working around the clock so they can’t interact with anyone else, but we all know that’s not happening. The swath of the judiciary that would get it robes in a bunch over working from home and the ones ready to strike down public health protocols for FREEDOM form a perfect circle. These are the judges that don’t care about the virus and that’s why they want clerks who don’t care either.
Even if there’s an argument for clerks to work in-person at the district court level, where in-person hearings might be happening, many districts have suspended in-person work for the near future anyway and the clerks aren’t refusing to ever come in to work, just balking at the idea that they have to commute into a tiny room on a regular basis.
And there’s absolutely no excuse for this at the appellate level. Researching and writing memos can easily be ported off-site. It’s basically a “Have Westlaw Password, Will Travel” job.
There are two reasons to force clerks into the office every day and they’re both bad. One is ego. Judges who want to be the center of attention with a little squad of minions following them around. There’s a vaccine on the way… just suffer without a retinue for another couple of months. The other is managerial incompetence. Do you not like Zoom meetings? Well, neither do we. But we all learned to do them and we got pretty good at managing our work load through video conferencing. If Biglaw can figure it out, then your chambers can figure it out.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.