Here's a comment from a managing partner (which is similar to other comments I've received from other established members of the profession, including federal judges):
"I have no reason to doubt your excellent reporting about her law clerks or the challenges in chambers. I do want to suggest a possible additional spin to consider, not based on any specific facts from her chambers but from my experience as a managing partner dealing with elite young lawyers of the same vintage as Judge Cannon’s law clerks. And here, I will sound like an old cranky Gen X person (which I am, and proudly so).
This new generation of lawyers is annoying. They don’t want to work very hard. They question everything. They expect everything to be perfect and on their terms and they have unrealistic expectations about how life and work and the real world operate.
Now, not everyone is like this. And in some respects, they have had some positive impact in changing the way things are done. But as with anything, there needs to be a balance, and they don’t have it. Perhaps my workaholic ways are unbalanced in one direction, but their approach is equally unbalanced.
When I read your reporting, I could not help but think of some of the young lawyers I have interacted with, and it makes me sympathize a bit with Judge Cannon and not believe everything I read. I have no doubt you are accurately reporting what you were told. I have no doubt they did quit. I do doubt that things were as bad as reported. As I said, I have no evidence other than my general observations about this generation."
David, would love you to follow up with this managing partner to define some of these terms. In no way do I want this to devolve into an argument about generational differences. But what the managing partner said is sort of a low-effort comment, and more specificity, I think, would help put his or her comments in relief against what you've described here.
What is working "very hard"?
Do they really question "everything" and expect "everything" to be "perfect"? (We lawyers should be suspicious of an absolute term like that.)
This is a big and interesting issue (and one that I'm hoping to tackle in an upcoming podcast appearance, assuming I have good internet while on vacation next week). Here's a brief response from the partner:
"My experience in recent years is associate billable hours are substantially down, and associates are much more likely to tell me they can’t work on a brief even if it’s their own case because they are too busy. This is something I never would have done. It’s objectively harder to get associates to take on new cases. They are very protective of their schedules."
The partner didn't give me specific numbers in terms of billables, so I don't know what they view as desirable or disappointing. (I would note, though, that billable-hour requirements have crept up over the 25 years that I have been in the profession.)
I regret not having read your post earlier, David. Great job. I came here to say something like this managing partner. I posted previously about my great experience as a clerk (EDNY). That was in the early 1990s. We worked six or seven days a week, every week. Long hours most days. I also drove more than an hour each way to get to the courthouse. The workload -- motions and other case work -- was crushing. And yet we did the work gladly, for not much money. We loved our judge and did not resent in the least that he required us to work like this. I knew I'd have to work hard, but the workload was still more than I expected. None of us ever complained, and certainly none of us quit. I in fact volunteered to stay on -- for free -- to help out before I started my next job.
I know this sounds like "in my day we used to walk ten miles in a blizzard to get to school". But I don't see how this "Mary" goes into a federal clerkship expecting a 40-hour week and am sympathetic to Judge Cannon in this specific regard. And if "Mary" isn't doing the job the judge expected, I'm sure the judge wasn't kind about it given the pressure under which she found herself.
As a millennial who remembers my partner mentors joking about undergoing training on how to deal with millennial associates, I wonder how much of this struggle with Gen Z is really just the same cross-generational issue as always. That is exacerbated by the reality that how we practice law is changing, and some of the things that were fundamental to how we were raised as young lawyers, like face time in the office, are less important (though, to be clear, still critical to an extent for development) in a changing world, whether we like it or not. For what it is worth, I’ve been impressed with how this generation is overcoming the challenges of remote law school or remotely starting their careers.
So this is a tremendous amount of reporting for just one day, and everyone wondering what is going on in Fort Pierce would be well served to read this!
The story you have here (both your reporting and analysis) strikes me as very plausible.
But your - tentative conclusion? - that we are looking at inexperience/insufficient as opposed to bias or malice does not quite explain everything to me. It does explain a lot: deadlines sliding, a lot of fully briefed issues sitting on her docket undecided, her perhaps unintentional creation of a sort of non-public docket for the Trump case while the parties argue over redactions and she does not decide the issue.
However, from a lot of the reporting I've read on her hearings as well as reading the opinions and orders she has issued, it just seems like she is VERY hard on the special counsel's office and VERY credulous toward any argument the defense makes. For exmaple, in one opinion she wrote, in which she ultimately agreed with the special counsel's position, she wrote about 8 pages criticizing the special counsel's position and then ended her order by acknowledging that circuit precent requires her to rule for the special counsel. This order:
This is one of the few written orders where she has found against Trump, and I cannot help but wonder if she is either unreasonably hostile to the special counsel, relucant to rule against Trump, or both.
Your article gets me maybe 80% of the way to "there's no bias or malice" but, for now, that 20% remains.
Thanks! I think reasonable minds can disagree on that 20 percent. I'm guessing that eventually we'll get feedback from the Eleventh Circuit.
Funnily enough, I'm getting criticism from my readers on the right, who are asking me what's my basis for saying Judge Cannon might have pro-Trump "bias." I will refer them to this comment!
Are there district judges who really only see the role as a stepping stone - ie, what they really want is a Court of Appeals appointment? I wonder this based on your comments about Cannon not approching her job like a trial court judge?
I'm sure there "are" such judges. Sitting in the cheap seats, I'm not going to venture any guesses how many think like that.
But I don't think it's at all weird that you might have district judges who are more appellate-minded, given that appellate issues are something that you really can just sort of pick up through incremental dabbling (at a distance, even). Merely diligently reading SCOTUSblog and following lower-court developments sets you up pretty well to understand the appellate scene at a basic level (although you'd be best served by some formal legal education, of course), where questions get served to you in at least moderately clean formats. And of course we've even had total non-lawyers doing appellate law on SCOTUS.
I don't really see any similar curiosity-minded path into the trial judge scene. You gotta be in the room, you gotta be in it a bunch of times, and probably you should be in it as a participant on one team or the other a bunch of times. And there's less of the sort of technical SCOTUSblog-style specialized coverage, just because it's too manpower-intensive to cover anything but specific high-interest trials, that themselves will end up somewhat distorted for it. (And because split-minute trial procedure issues, including all the routine ones, are not well suited for even specialized journalism.)
I mean, I think pointing to that opinion is not particularly persuasive to me. And oversells the "Connor is biased in favor of Trump" considerably (it would be more persuasive of bias to show me an order in this case ruling in Trump's favor that contained strained logic or ignored prosecutions arguments -- which may very well exist here!).
In that opinion, ~5 pages were dedicated to the discussion where Trump's team opposed the prosecution's ability carte blanche to redact information in discovery and only provide Trump's team with the prosecution's summaries of what was redacted. And when precedent requires you to do something strange (i.e. interpreting a statute's usage of the words "may" and "if" to mean something always happens), it makes sense to lay out what that that strange thing is -- especially here where Trump previously had full authority over classifications. I get the desire for trial attorneys to be like "skip all the words, just point to the precedent, and rule in my favor", but the documents are called "opinions" for a reason, and courts owe a duty to the public (for which this case has quite a lot of attention!) to explain reasoning. Again, especially when the reasoning is really just "well the precedent says so, even if it doesn't make much sense to a lay reader in the public".
Additionally, and I get that this is Donald Trump so we kind of lose sight of these things, but I think it's actually good that the government in a prosecution is held to an exacting standard -- so it's difficult for me to see a statement of "most rulings have gone in Trump's favor" and infer clear bias from that statement alone. It sort of requires the underlying assumption that the correct number is 50%, and also an underlying assumption that the prosecution is fair and measured. Taking Trump out of the equation, and viewing through the lens of a normal prosecution and defense... i would probably reject both of those assumptions in most prosecutions. So I don't know why I should accept them here.
Do you have thoughts about whether the clerk who reported positively on their clerkship with Judge Cannon is accurately describing their experience? The norms around clerking create an expectation that clerks will only speak positively about their judge, and given the very small number of clerks Judge Cannon has had overall, the incentive for any of her former clerks to describe the experience as a positive one is strong - especially for a clerk who (1) is probably easy for people in-the-know to identify and (2) hopes to have a future in conservative legal circles. Given that, I thought that it's much more unusual that you were able to learn such negative information about Mary's experience. In other words, I am doubtful that Judge Cannon's management style changed so dramatically; I think it's much more likely that the earlier clerk is painting an inaccurately rosy picture.
That's a totally fair point—which is one that Aliza Shatzman of the Legal Accountability Project, which aims to protect law clerks, makes often.
But in addition to speaking to former clerks directly, I spoke to, shall we say, people they would be candid to (I really try to protect my sources, which is why I often use the omniscient voice). And they confirmed that Judge Cannon 1.0 was a good boss.
Also, to add some nuance, there are some in-between clerks, who aren't of the "love her" or "hate her" camps. For example, there was one 2022-2023 clerk who was somewhat unhappy, but not so unhappy to quit.
So I think her management style definitely changed, although one can certainly argue as to degree.
Thank you for taking the time to report this out. This story is a good reminder of how easy it is, from afar, to lose sight of the fact that the judges/clerks handling these high-profile cases are human beings who are under a tremendous amount of pressure and scrutiny, much of it unexpected and not of their choosing. Show me a person who has never made a head-scratcher or several, and I'll show you a person who has never been overwhelmed.
really appreciate the behind the scenes reporting. Practicing lawyers, of course, know that the general media/SM narratives about these cases rarely, if ever, capture reality, and it's very refreshing to have your reporting on it. Not to mention that your reporting is actually fair and accurate.
I have mixed feelings and thoughts about this. On the one hand, given the criticism of Judge Cannon, important to provide context. On the other, if I were the Judge, or law clerk, or other court personnel, I might well be distracted from my duty to contribute to the administration of justice in these (and other) cases by the sideshows.
I clerked at both the trial (district) and appellate (circuit) level for a total of almost 4 years - I clerked for a newly appointed district judge starting in February 1980, and served in an overlap capacity after 2 years to October 1982. A new federal trial judge has to get up to speed quickly, and I and my fellow law clerk had previous clerkship experience (me at the circuit, she at the district), and were hired to provide that extra boost.
The trial court pace is definitely more exacting - and in my case, the district was groaning under the daunting years of backlog, so there was an extra push to move things along. Naturally, this required a lot of extra effort, and I regularly spent 80-100 hours per week for those over 2 years (yes, I was a perfectionist workaholic). Our judge actually spent that much time, or more, taking work home as well. There was a little resentment on my part for the lack of urgency in some other chambers - when one judge is sitting on a number of matters, it increases the workload for others. So I have a lot of empathy for a chambers in a high-pressure case involving a (former) president with international attention and criticism, also dealing with some clerks having to make up for others who either can't (no security clearance) or won't.
And there does seem to be something of a generational gap in expectations. I fully expected a federal clerkship to be demanding, and even then, it wasn't as much of a demand as my wife experienced going to medical school. I considered the demands of med school, and the following internship to be little more than hazing - 24 hour stretches and beyond when there was no objective reason for it, beyond the rational that you had to prove you could do it in an emergency. And yet we got thru our complaining and soldiered on (with our first child no less - yes, we were crazy).
Our daughter, on the other hand, is much more concerned with work/life balance - something that was a relatively newly articulated concern in my practice - our state bar didn't even have a committee addressing that until later in my own career. And yet she too managed a demanding internship after veterinary school.
Each of us since those internships has worked part-time at stretches to achieve work/life balance - but there wasn't any expectation that the internships were going to be anything but demanding.
I've wondered whether there is more of a sense of entitlement now - as a Yale law grad I have followed the more recent controversies and do wonder how much seems to have changed from my law school experience. Sounds like this will be the topic of more reports to come.
"she was supposed to be working fixed hours, per her agreement with Judge Cannon. But because of the crushing amount of work—which Kari had to perform a disproportionate amount of, thanks to the aforementioned security-clearance issues of a co-clerk—she was working far more than 40 hours a week. In October 2023, after a year and two months in chambers, Kari quit. She wasn’t getting the fixed hours she had bargained for,"
The "on information and belief" caveat was good to write earlier in thearticle. This sounds implausible. She'd been on the job for a year and then was signed on for 40 hours/week, which the judge breached immediately (maybe not an enforceable contract, but breached nonetheless). And what's this about "parental leave"? I wouldn't think a clerkship is a time to have a baby-- and if she did, that must have been very tough for the judge, who suddenly lost 1/3 of her staff . The judge's docket was probably falling behind even before the Trump case hit it.
Here's a comment from a managing partner (which is similar to other comments I've received from other established members of the profession, including federal judges):
"I have no reason to doubt your excellent reporting about her law clerks or the challenges in chambers. I do want to suggest a possible additional spin to consider, not based on any specific facts from her chambers but from my experience as a managing partner dealing with elite young lawyers of the same vintage as Judge Cannon’s law clerks. And here, I will sound like an old cranky Gen X person (which I am, and proudly so).
This new generation of lawyers is annoying. They don’t want to work very hard. They question everything. They expect everything to be perfect and on their terms and they have unrealistic expectations about how life and work and the real world operate.
Now, not everyone is like this. And in some respects, they have had some positive impact in changing the way things are done. But as with anything, there needs to be a balance, and they don’t have it. Perhaps my workaholic ways are unbalanced in one direction, but their approach is equally unbalanced.
When I read your reporting, I could not help but think of some of the young lawyers I have interacted with, and it makes me sympathize a bit with Judge Cannon and not believe everything I read. I have no doubt you are accurately reporting what you were told. I have no doubt they did quit. I do doubt that things were as bad as reported. As I said, I have no evidence other than my general observations about this generation."
David, would love you to follow up with this managing partner to define some of these terms. In no way do I want this to devolve into an argument about generational differences. But what the managing partner said is sort of a low-effort comment, and more specificity, I think, would help put his or her comments in relief against what you've described here.
What is working "very hard"?
Do they really question "everything" and expect "everything" to be "perfect"? (We lawyers should be suspicious of an absolute term like that.)
What expectations *are* realistic?
This is a big and interesting issue (and one that I'm hoping to tackle in an upcoming podcast appearance, assuming I have good internet while on vacation next week). Here's a brief response from the partner:
"My experience in recent years is associate billable hours are substantially down, and associates are much more likely to tell me they can’t work on a brief even if it’s their own case because they are too busy. This is something I never would have done. It’s objectively harder to get associates to take on new cases. They are very protective of their schedules."
The partner didn't give me specific numbers in terms of billables, so I don't know what they view as desirable or disappointing. (I would note, though, that billable-hour requirements have crept up over the 25 years that I have been in the profession.)
Thanks for following up!
I regret not having read your post earlier, David. Great job. I came here to say something like this managing partner. I posted previously about my great experience as a clerk (EDNY). That was in the early 1990s. We worked six or seven days a week, every week. Long hours most days. I also drove more than an hour each way to get to the courthouse. The workload -- motions and other case work -- was crushing. And yet we did the work gladly, for not much money. We loved our judge and did not resent in the least that he required us to work like this. I knew I'd have to work hard, but the workload was still more than I expected. None of us ever complained, and certainly none of us quit. I in fact volunteered to stay on -- for free -- to help out before I started my next job.
I know this sounds like "in my day we used to walk ten miles in a blizzard to get to school". But I don't see how this "Mary" goes into a federal clerkship expecting a 40-hour week and am sympathetic to Judge Cannon in this specific regard. And if "Mary" isn't doing the job the judge expected, I'm sure the judge wasn't kind about it given the pressure under which she found herself.
As a millennial who remembers my partner mentors joking about undergoing training on how to deal with millennial associates, I wonder how much of this struggle with Gen Z is really just the same cross-generational issue as always. That is exacerbated by the reality that how we practice law is changing, and some of the things that were fundamental to how we were raised as young lawyers, like face time in the office, are less important (though, to be clear, still critical to an extent for development) in a changing world, whether we like it or not. For what it is worth, I’ve been impressed with how this generation is overcoming the challenges of remote law school or remotely starting their careers.
So this is a tremendous amount of reporting for just one day, and everyone wondering what is going on in Fort Pierce would be well served to read this!
The story you have here (both your reporting and analysis) strikes me as very plausible.
But your - tentative conclusion? - that we are looking at inexperience/insufficient as opposed to bias or malice does not quite explain everything to me. It does explain a lot: deadlines sliding, a lot of fully briefed issues sitting on her docket undecided, her perhaps unintentional creation of a sort of non-public docket for the Trump case while the parties argue over redactions and she does not decide the issue.
However, from a lot of the reporting I've read on her hearings as well as reading the opinions and orders she has issued, it just seems like she is VERY hard on the special counsel's office and VERY credulous toward any argument the defense makes. For exmaple, in one opinion she wrote, in which she ultimately agreed with the special counsel's position, she wrote about 8 pages criticizing the special counsel's position and then ended her order by acknowledging that circuit precent requires her to rule for the special counsel. This order:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.346.0_2.pdf
This is one of the few written orders where she has found against Trump, and I cannot help but wonder if she is either unreasonably hostile to the special counsel, relucant to rule against Trump, or both.
Your article gets me maybe 80% of the way to "there's no bias or malice" but, for now, that 20% remains.
Thanks! I think reasonable minds can disagree on that 20 percent. I'm guessing that eventually we'll get feedback from the Eleventh Circuit.
Funnily enough, I'm getting criticism from my readers on the right, who are asking me what's my basis for saying Judge Cannon might have pro-Trump "bias." I will refer them to this comment!
Are there district judges who really only see the role as a stepping stone - ie, what they really want is a Court of Appeals appointment? I wonder this based on your comments about Cannon not approching her job like a trial court judge?
I'm sure there "are" such judges. Sitting in the cheap seats, I'm not going to venture any guesses how many think like that.
But I don't think it's at all weird that you might have district judges who are more appellate-minded, given that appellate issues are something that you really can just sort of pick up through incremental dabbling (at a distance, even). Merely diligently reading SCOTUSblog and following lower-court developments sets you up pretty well to understand the appellate scene at a basic level (although you'd be best served by some formal legal education, of course), where questions get served to you in at least moderately clean formats. And of course we've even had total non-lawyers doing appellate law on SCOTUS.
I don't really see any similar curiosity-minded path into the trial judge scene. You gotta be in the room, you gotta be in it a bunch of times, and probably you should be in it as a participant on one team or the other a bunch of times. And there's less of the sort of technical SCOTUSblog-style specialized coverage, just because it's too manpower-intensive to cover anything but specific high-interest trials, that themselves will end up somewhat distorted for it. (And because split-minute trial procedure issues, including all the routine ones, are not well suited for even specialized journalism.)
I mean, I think pointing to that opinion is not particularly persuasive to me. And oversells the "Connor is biased in favor of Trump" considerably (it would be more persuasive of bias to show me an order in this case ruling in Trump's favor that contained strained logic or ignored prosecutions arguments -- which may very well exist here!).
In that opinion, ~5 pages were dedicated to the discussion where Trump's team opposed the prosecution's ability carte blanche to redact information in discovery and only provide Trump's team with the prosecution's summaries of what was redacted. And when precedent requires you to do something strange (i.e. interpreting a statute's usage of the words "may" and "if" to mean something always happens), it makes sense to lay out what that that strange thing is -- especially here where Trump previously had full authority over classifications. I get the desire for trial attorneys to be like "skip all the words, just point to the precedent, and rule in my favor", but the documents are called "opinions" for a reason, and courts owe a duty to the public (for which this case has quite a lot of attention!) to explain reasoning. Again, especially when the reasoning is really just "well the precedent says so, even if it doesn't make much sense to a lay reader in the public".
Additionally, and I get that this is Donald Trump so we kind of lose sight of these things, but I think it's actually good that the government in a prosecution is held to an exacting standard -- so it's difficult for me to see a statement of "most rulings have gone in Trump's favor" and infer clear bias from that statement alone. It sort of requires the underlying assumption that the correct number is 50%, and also an underlying assumption that the prosecution is fair and measured. Taking Trump out of the equation, and viewing through the lens of a normal prosecution and defense... i would probably reject both of those assumptions in most prosecutions. So I don't know why I should accept them here.
Do you have thoughts about whether the clerk who reported positively on their clerkship with Judge Cannon is accurately describing their experience? The norms around clerking create an expectation that clerks will only speak positively about their judge, and given the very small number of clerks Judge Cannon has had overall, the incentive for any of her former clerks to describe the experience as a positive one is strong - especially for a clerk who (1) is probably easy for people in-the-know to identify and (2) hopes to have a future in conservative legal circles. Given that, I thought that it's much more unusual that you were able to learn such negative information about Mary's experience. In other words, I am doubtful that Judge Cannon's management style changed so dramatically; I think it's much more likely that the earlier clerk is painting an inaccurately rosy picture.
That's a totally fair point—which is one that Aliza Shatzman of the Legal Accountability Project, which aims to protect law clerks, makes often.
But in addition to speaking to former clerks directly, I spoke to, shall we say, people they would be candid to (I really try to protect my sources, which is why I often use the omniscient voice). And they confirmed that Judge Cannon 1.0 was a good boss.
Also, to add some nuance, there are some in-between clerks, who aren't of the "love her" or "hate her" camps. For example, there was one 2022-2023 clerk who was somewhat unhappy, but not so unhappy to quit.
So I think her management style definitely changed, although one can certainly argue as to degree.
Thanks as always for the follow up and - especially - for the nuance (which is all-too-rare in these sorts of discussions).
Thank you for taking the time to report this out. This story is a good reminder of how easy it is, from afar, to lose sight of the fact that the judges/clerks handling these high-profile cases are human beings who are under a tremendous amount of pressure and scrutiny, much of it unexpected and not of their choosing. Show me a person who has never made a head-scratcher or several, and I'll show you a person who has never been overwhelmed.
Excellent reporting David!
really appreciate the behind the scenes reporting. Practicing lawyers, of course, know that the general media/SM narratives about these cases rarely, if ever, capture reality, and it's very refreshing to have your reporting on it. Not to mention that your reporting is actually fair and accurate.
I have mixed feelings and thoughts about this. On the one hand, given the criticism of Judge Cannon, important to provide context. On the other, if I were the Judge, or law clerk, or other court personnel, I might well be distracted from my duty to contribute to the administration of justice in these (and other) cases by the sideshows.
I clerked at both the trial (district) and appellate (circuit) level for a total of almost 4 years - I clerked for a newly appointed district judge starting in February 1980, and served in an overlap capacity after 2 years to October 1982. A new federal trial judge has to get up to speed quickly, and I and my fellow law clerk had previous clerkship experience (me at the circuit, she at the district), and were hired to provide that extra boost.
The trial court pace is definitely more exacting - and in my case, the district was groaning under the daunting years of backlog, so there was an extra push to move things along. Naturally, this required a lot of extra effort, and I regularly spent 80-100 hours per week for those over 2 years (yes, I was a perfectionist workaholic). Our judge actually spent that much time, or more, taking work home as well. There was a little resentment on my part for the lack of urgency in some other chambers - when one judge is sitting on a number of matters, it increases the workload for others. So I have a lot of empathy for a chambers in a high-pressure case involving a (former) president with international attention and criticism, also dealing with some clerks having to make up for others who either can't (no security clearance) or won't.
And there does seem to be something of a generational gap in expectations. I fully expected a federal clerkship to be demanding, and even then, it wasn't as much of a demand as my wife experienced going to medical school. I considered the demands of med school, and the following internship to be little more than hazing - 24 hour stretches and beyond when there was no objective reason for it, beyond the rational that you had to prove you could do it in an emergency. And yet we got thru our complaining and soldiered on (with our first child no less - yes, we were crazy).
Our daughter, on the other hand, is much more concerned with work/life balance - something that was a relatively newly articulated concern in my practice - our state bar didn't even have a committee addressing that until later in my own career. And yet she too managed a demanding internship after veterinary school.
Each of us since those internships has worked part-time at stretches to achieve work/life balance - but there wasn't any expectation that the internships were going to be anything but demanding.
I've wondered whether there is more of a sense of entitlement now - as a Yale law grad I have followed the more recent controversies and do wonder how much seems to have changed from my law school experience. Sounds like this will be the topic of more reports to come.
"she was supposed to be working fixed hours, per her agreement with Judge Cannon. But because of the crushing amount of work—which Kari had to perform a disproportionate amount of, thanks to the aforementioned security-clearance issues of a co-clerk—she was working far more than 40 hours a week. In October 2023, after a year and two months in chambers, Kari quit. She wasn’t getting the fixed hours she had bargained for,"
The "on information and belief" caveat was good to write earlier in thearticle. This sounds implausible. She'd been on the job for a year and then was signed on for 40 hours/week, which the judge breached immediately (maybe not an enforceable contract, but breached nonetheless). And what's this about "parental leave"? I wouldn't think a clerkship is a time to have a baby-- and if she did, that must have been very tough for the judge, who suddenly lost 1/3 of her staff . The judge's docket was probably falling behind even before the Trump case hit it.