This summer, I interned for a magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. Although magistrate judges are not Article III Judges,1 they play crucial role in district court proceedings, and can provide a truly unique learning experience for the law student eager to learn how litigation really works. In the District of Maryland, magistrate judges play four main roles: (1) presiding over settlement conferences, (2) resolving discovery disputes, (3) pretrial criminal procedure,2 and (4) adjudicating cases where the parties have consented to be heard before a magistrate.
As an intern, I was able to observe and/or participate in each one of these roles. For example, I had the opportunity to sit-in on settlement conferences, where I observed how the lawyers interacted with their clients and with the judge, and gained insights into the various tools a magistrate judge uses to facilitate settlement. This kind of behind-the-scenes glimpse of the settlement process is invaluable, and really only available to a magistrate judge intern. Also, the (relatively) lighter caseload of a magistrate judge meant that there were numerous opportunities for me to observe proceedings in the courthouse, and my judge encouraged it. Again, this gave me an opportunity to observe the etiquette and procedural nuances of courtroom lawyering with a frequency not available to most other judicial interns. Most importantly, however, I gained a significant amount of writing experience, and of the handful of draft opinions that I worked on over the summer, about half were related to discovery disputes. The others were dispositive motions for summary judgment. Finally, magistrate judges tend to be less aloof and more approachable than their district judge counterparts. Typically, magistrate judges are only a few years out of private practice or prestigious public sector jobs like the U.S. Attorney’s office. They work much more closely with their clerks and interns than is common for an Article III judge, and they can be an important resource in the job hunt.
Very often, law students seek the prestige of an internship with a district or circuit judge, and understandably so. But, considering the small percentage of suits that actually go to trial, and the even smaller percentage that go up on appeal, there is a strong pragmatic argument for interning with a magistrate judge instead. Put another way, magistrate judges handle the overwhelming majority of the work with which trial lawyers are involved on a daily basis, and before a partner is going to let you, the young associate, anywhere near the oral argument podium, you will be expected to manage a large amount of discovery matters, pretrial motions, and settlement communications. In this way, the experiences you have with a magistrate judge will better prepare you for the associate workload, and may actually get you into the courtroom faster.