The issue may be if those who care recruit from the ‘lesser’ schools. If they discriminate, do you really want to there?
Federal clerkships do tend to go to only the Harvard/Yale/Stanford group.
I don’t think it is necessarily discrimination in the negative way we think about discriminating by race, SES status, religion, etc… It is just an efficient screening mechanism, the assumption being that if you are in the top quarter/third of a highly regarded law school, you have cleared a pretty high initial hurdle. For example, when I recruited, I interviewed at Stanford and Berkeley only in NorCal. There are other fine law schools in the Bay Area, but there are limitations on time and money for recruiting. Similarly, I interviewed at UCLA and USC only in SoCal. We spread a wider net in NYC, interviewing beyond Columbia and NYU at schools like Cardozo and Fordham.
The first job is pretty key for your second job. If you are an associate at one of the top BigLaw firms, it is easier to get a lateral job at another firm, including another prestigious BigLaw firm, go in house for some Fortune 500 or even jump industry (eg IB). If your job is at a lesser firm, it is very hard to move up in prestige (and compensation) unless you have developed a particular specialty.
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It’s not so much discrimination as law firm selectivity. Firms have a sliding scale of minimum gpas depending on the law school, with top firms requiring students have a higher gpa from lower ranked schools to get an interview. For lots of students interested in the biglaw paycheck for a few years and solid exit strategies, not being able to interview at Wachtell because they don’t come from a high enough ranked law school is not relevant, as long as they can get a job with a good enough firm. I think the Vault law firm rankings should be used the same as US News college rankings – look at tiers and don’t get caught up in whether Millbank is really a better firm than Covington, just like it would be silly to obsess about whether Bowdoin is really better than Carleton.
Also, while the top ranked law schools tend to have higher federal clerkship rates, clerking from outside the T6 as well as T14 happens regularly (though that leads to a whole other discussion about the role of FedSoc student membership as a pipeline to clerkships and how that pipeline makes hiring by non-FedSoc judges even more competitive).
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Not saying it is discrimination, just that if you want a federal clerkship, your chances are practically nil at anything but a top school, and for the US supreme court, you’d better pick Harvard, Yale or Stanford. I know someone from a top DC law school who did get a federal clerkship, but it was in Tennessee and not DC or Baltimore or even her home town which has a federal courthouse and the 10th circuit.
I’ve only known one SCOTUS clerk, and he went to Harvard. SCOTUS itself is pretty much Harvard and Yale law grads, and they came up thru the federal courts. It worked for them, so they stick with what they know and hire Harvard and Yale law.
Then there are people like Heidi Bond (also known as romance writer Courtney Milan) who graduated from Michigan Law School and clerked for both Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy at SCOTUS.
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Sandy and Tony are westerners. Kennedy did go to Harvard law, but Standford undergrad so not so snoody. Barrett also kept her law clerks from non-Ivy schools but not sure what she’s doing now.
My only friend who clerked at the Supreme Court went to Penn Law.
https://www.law.virginia.edu/news/news-about-supreme-court-clerks
Just so everyone is aware of UVA Law School’s record. The Supreme Court likes clerks from there
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Just for those who may read this later – a law school’s clerkship rate relates to any federal court – district court, appellate courts, and the very very rare Supreme Court clerkship.
What did Chicago do to offend you? 
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Hi, this is from 2010, but it does reflect the thoughts of some Justices on where they get their clerks.
Yeah, as I understand it, Supreme Court Justices hire a lot of kids out of the most selective law schools in large part just because they can. Like, they may want interesting people from a variety of backgrounds, but they also want people who are very good at doing what appellate clerks do, which is a lot of legal reading, researching, discussing, and writing. And they can get all that with applicants from the most selective law schools.
So, often they do. Not as a rule, but very disproportionately.
Of course the vast, vast majority of graduates of even the smallest handful of the most selective law schools are not going to be Supreme Court clerks. So that specifically is not a particularly good grounds for choosing a law school.
But appellate clerkships generally? Yes, if that is a potential interest (for many it is not), you might want to have that as a factor in mind when choosing between law schools.
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It takes a special type to get the most selective clerkships. The ones I knew, including a friend/classmate who got a SCOTUS clerkship, are gunning for a clerkship from day 1. In addition to grades, you almost always have to be on law review and an editor at that. I had decent grades and I got the law review packet, but it involved writing a note over a weekend when the pros were playing at Pebble Beach. Watching Jack Nicklaus live seemed the better choice then.
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Honestly, two years of law review including a top editorial position your third year is a good way to take what can be a relatively chill couple years and turn them into much more work. I didn’t make our main law review but was eventually EIC of another journal, and that was by no means easy sailing.
In the end I was able to get a federal appellate clerkship, and I do think I got a lot out of both of those experiences (EIC and clerking).
But was any of that necessary to having a great legal career? Definitely not.
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