A judicial secretary's many roles: working with an appellate judge and clerks.

• Author: Wasby, Stephen L.

1. INTRODUCTION

   A judge's chambers has been said to "consist of loosely organized relationships between judges and their staff and among the members of the staff." (1) Despite its "bureaucratization, a result in part of increasing numbers of personnel, (2) the environment remains one of work "in small, isolated chambers with a minimum of work contacts outside," and the relationships within chambers have been called "the most intense and mutually dependent ... outside of marriage, parenthood, or a love affair." (3)

   It goes without saying that secretaries are a key part of any office; that is no less true of the office ("chambers") of judges. Yet in the literature on judges, secretaries are almost totally invisible, receiving little more than passing reference in some judicial biographies. One cannot examine a judge's chambers, including the judge's relations with clerks, without also looking at the judge's secretaries, with whom the clerks also interact and who often supervise the clerks. This Article is an attempt to increase the visibility of judges' secretaries and to provide at least an initial picture of their work. To do so, we explore the chambers of one appellate judge, Alfred T. Goodwin, a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since 1971, and before that, a state trial judge, a member of the Oregon Supreme Court, and a federal district judge in Oregon.

   This Article is based on interviews with a half-dozen of Judge Goodwin's secretaries; casual conversations with several of them; a 1995 survey of the judge's clerks; (4) extended conversations with the judge as part of the author's on-going research on the Ninth Circuit; and in-chambers observation of interactions of judge, secretaries, and clerks during several months in one year and over one-week periods in several other years.

   Secretaries and clerks may be attracted to a judge of a particular ideology and temperament. Judge Goodwin is a pragmatic moderate who is thought to be easy to work for and who gives his secretaries and clerks considerable autonomy to carry out their tasks. Because of the variability in judges' uses of, and interaction with, their secretaries and clerks, one should be cautious about over-generalizing based on the description of one judge's chambers. However, the reported experiences of the several secretaries and large number of clerks who served Judge Goodwin provide a far richer picture than was previously available of in-chambers working relationships, and they also spotlight the secretaries who are such a crucial part of the judicial family.

   The Article begins with a description of the number of people in the judge's chambers, both secretaries and clerks. It then turns to an examination of judge-secretary interactions and then to interactions between secretaries and law clerks. The latter examination includes some observations about law clerk selection; primary attention is given to the secretary's important roles as gatekeeper and as "traffic cop" directing work to clerks.

2. INCREASED STAFF SIZE

   Most judges' chambers have changed over time through the addition of personnel. During his initial appellate service, on the Oregon Supreme Court, Justice Goodwin had one clerk and one secretary. When he moved to the United States District Court, he started with one secretary and a clerk-bailiff in addition to his regular clerk, but he then added a second clerk. The two-clerk situation carried over when he joined the Ninth Circuit, but in due course the number of clerks grew to three, and for a brief period, there were four. The judge continued with three clerks when he took senior status in 1991 after having served as chief judge. In addition, from time to time, law students worked for a semester as "externs" in his chambers.

   Well into his court of appeals service, he obtained a half-secretary line to assist with his work as the court's en banc coordinator, and that line grew into a full-time second secretary position. A division of labor eventually developed between the judge's two secretaries. The "lead," or senior, or principal, secretary handled administrative work for the office, the judge's correspondence, particularly the "more political" letters, and press work, but did little case-related work. The second secretary, although at times filling in for the lead secretary, served as the "case secretary, keeping an eye on cases, getting them through in a timely fashion," (5) and making sure they didn't fall through the cracks.

   The judge retained the en banc coordinator function while he was chief judge and for a short time thereafter. While for a short period one clerk took particular responsibility for en banc matters, that work was subsequently carried out by the lead secretary. The judge did not add a specific staff person to assist with his duties as chief judge, (6) but the lead secretary handled much of that work for the judge, including excusing judges from meetings and responding to their requests to sit elsewhere. Some time after giving up the chief judgeship, Judge Goodwin functioned with only one secretary, particularly as use of computers by the judge himself and by all clerks diminished the need for secretarial assistance in preparation of many documents.

   The growth in numbers certainly changed the atmosphere in chambers. This change is reflected in the comment of one secretary, who had experienced both the one clerk/one secretary situation and the much larger office, that in the former situation, which was also "more fun," the secretaries saw more of each case. She also felt that with multiple clerks, the judge did less writing (i.e., he was less likely to put a piece of paper in the typewriter to develop a thought), although with the advent of computer word-processing technology, it was easier for the judge to draft a document or to edit the clerks' work on-line.

   The growth in staff also illustrates the development of what the late Fifth Circuit Judge Alvin Rubin characterized as the "bureaucratization of the federal courts." (7) Not only did each judge have more law clerks and secretaries in chambers but the judge also had "the services of staff law clerks, the staff of the circuit clerk's office and the circuit executive." Thus the judge had "a small appellate enterprise," (8) not only requiring the judge's familiarity with a greater number of people but also claiming more of his time for supervising them. In these terms, when Judge Goodwin was chief judge, he had a much larger staff--extending to the Clerk's and Circuit Executive's offices. However, he never seemed to have "appropriated" those personnel as his staff, and apart from using his lead secretary for some administrative work related to being chief judge, he maintained the separation between his own staff and the court's and circuit's staffs, which were not located in the same city as his chambers. (9)

3. THE JUDGE AND HIS SECRETARIES

   The judge's secretaries have performed many functions and have engaged in a wide variety of activities themselves or assured that someone else did them. This is best captured in a clerk's observation about one secretary, "She knew what needed to be done and found someone to do it." A secretary's job is to be "the key personnel manager, doorkeeper, scheduler" who deals with the "nitty-gritty details." Among a secretary's specific tasks are answering the phones, serving as receptionist when someone comes to the chambers...