Grades 'Don't Matter', They Said: The 2026 Clerkship State of Play
Here is where we are in June 2026, penultimate year. Applications are open or about to be. You have been to the firm nights, the clerkship cocktail evenings, the careers fair. Every firm in the room stood up and told you the same thing. There is no GPA cut-off. Grades are just one part of a holistic process. They read every single application. They look at the whole person.
The room nodded politely.
The room also did not believe a word of it.
I have spent the last few weeks collecting your DMs on exactly this, because it is the question that comes up every single clerkship season and the answer never gets any clearer. So let me give you the actual state of play, based on what penultimate students, paralegals and recent clerks are telling me right now (plus quite a few senior lawyers who know the truth, trusting me to share anonymously which I will).
What you are actually reporting back to me
The stories do not line up… that is the first thing to jumps out at me.
One of you, a mature-age penultimate JD student in Perth with no family in law, has been asking firms point blank whether they use a system to cull by grade. Every HR rep said no. Several of the big firms use RARE tech to consider personal context behind lower marks, which is genuinely good. One firm quietly implied a 70 cut-off anyway.
Another of you got told by a top-tier contact that applications are stripped of identifying detail and sent to senior associates to review by hand. Which sounds beautifully objective until you remember that every SA values something different, right down to which university you went to. That is not a system. That is twenty different systems working as one.
Then there is the part nobody can square.
One of you had an 80 WAM/GPA and six years of legal experience including proven commercial work, applied and did not get a single interview. Another had a 5.7 GPA, did not go to a Go8 uni, had never worked at a law firm and walked away with nine offers including four top tiers.
Same season. Same profession. Wildly different outcomes.
So forgive me if I am sceptical of the line that this is a clean, transparent, grades-don't-really-matter meritocracy.
The maths that nobody says out loud
The big firms receive a thousand or more applications for roughly twenty positions. Apparently, some top-tier programs in Sydney and Melbourne pull two to four thousand applications for thirty to fifty spots.
A human being is not reading every one of those with equal care before a partner ever sees a shortlist. There is filtering happening before the personal review begins. There has to be. The transcript is the first gate and a WAM/GPA band is almost certainly part of how that first gate works, whatever the careers night script says.
I am not even mad that a bar exists.
Firms are allowed to hire for capability.
What I cannot stand is the performance of pretending there is no bar while everyone in the room can feel one.
The disingenuousness is the actual problem
This is what is wearing me down. It is not that clerkships are competitive. We all know they are competitive. I have been calling it the Clerkship Hunger Games for years for a reason.
It is the gap between what gets said at the firm night and what every student knows is true. The polished "we don't have a cut-off" answer, delivered in the same careful HR wording at four different firms, lands as a script.
And a script, when everyone can sense it is a script, does the opposite of what it is meant to do. It builds distrust. It makes a smart, anxious twenty-two-year-old walk out thinking the whole thing is rigged and unknowable, when the truth would actually be more reassuring than the spin.
Then we layer the current trend of "Day In The Life" reels on top. The immaculate lighting. The spotless desk. The OOTD before a 7am start. I have written about this in Selling The Dream Through People Who Can't Say No and again in Smoke and Mirrors.
The curated version of the job is not a lie exactly. It is just badly incomplete. Showing a glossy clerk reel while refusing to say what you actually look for in an application is having it both ways.
Gilbert and Tobin, of all firms, got closest
Here is the part that surprised me, based on what I heard from people in the room at the cocktail evenings.
Gilbert and Tobin are the one firm people described as actually owning it. They were clear they prefer an 80 and above WAM/GPA and do not tend to look below 75. They were open about the intensity of the work, the "have a pillow in your desk drawer" vibe, no fluff and no pretending it is a gentle nine to five.
Are they notoriously high-performing and all-consuming? Yes.
Is that a culture that will suit everyone? Absolutely not.
But after a full day of being told by firm after firm that grades do not matter, while you sit there knowing that is not the whole truth, hearing one firm just say the quiet part out loud was apparently the most refreshing moment for many.
That is the entire point I am making.
Owning your standards is not unkind. It is respectful. It lets a student self-select in or out with real information instead of vibes and a script.
The first-mover advantage is sitting right there
So this next bit is for the HR teams, the graduate recruitment leads and the people partners who might land on this post. Hi. I am not going to stop talking about this, so you may as well hear me out.
There is an enormous first-mover advantage waiting for the first firm that goes fully transparent about its clerkship (and graduate) process, end to end. Tell people where your academic band sits. Tell them what actually moves the needle beyond grades. Tell them what the work really looks like in year three, not just the clerk highlight reel.
You will not lose your best applicants by doing this. You will attract the ones who are values-aligned, who back themselves, who chose you with their eyes open. The students who respect the honesty are exactly the ones you want staying past year two. Transparency is not a risk to your brand. It is the cheapest trust-building exercise available to you and right now almost nobody is using it.
… and it is coming whether firms like it or not
The law is moving toward forcing this anyway.
Australia is introducing transparency obligations around automated decision-making into the privacy framework. The direction of travel is clear. If a computer program is making or substantially helping make decisions that significantly affect people, organisations are going to have to be upfront about it. A clerkship application that gets pre-filtered by software before a human ever sees it is squarely the kind of thing regulators are going to be increasingly interested in.
The firms that get ahead of this and choose transparency now will look like leaders. The ones who wait until they are legally required to disclose it will look like they were hiding something. They will not have been, necessarily, but that is how it will read. Better to own it early than to be dragged into owning it later.
What this actually means for you, the applicant
If you have read this far worried about your own WAM/GPA, breathe. Here is the takeaway.
Throw your hat in the ring. The 5.7, non-Go8, no-firm-experience student who got nine offers is not a totally freak event. It happens every year because a great application, a real relationship with HR before offer day and a partner who interviews you and likes you can absolutely outrun a number on a transcript. Recent grade trends matter more than a single early stumble. Below a soft cut-off is rarely a hard no if the rest of your application gives them a reason to pull you through.
Treat the application season as a forcing function even if no offer comes.
You will end up with a sharp CV, a tidy cover letter, a LinkedIn that actually works as your digital first impression and a couple of networking conversations you would not otherwise have had. None of that expires.
Please remember the bigger truth I keep coming back to in The Truth About the Big Law Dream and The Junior Lawyer Hunger Games. The clerkship is just one door. It is not the only door. Missing it does not make you less than. It makes you part of the large and excellent majority who got in another way.
The process is opaque. That is not your fault and it is not a reflection of your worth. I am going to keep dragging it into the light until the firms decide to do it themselves.
They will get there. I just intend to be annoying about it until they do.
Mel
Further reading from the archive:
The Truth About the Big Law Dream · The Junior Lawyer Hunger Games · How to Nail Your Clerkship Interview · Smoke and Mirrors: Why the Glass Door Isn't Always Transparent · Australian Big Six Law Firms: An Analysis · Prestige Is a Currency With a Short Shelf Life · Your Law School Doesn't Matter as Much as You Think · Selling The Dream Through People Who Can't Say No
Want the full playbook on how recruitment actually works and more? It is all in the Ungatekept Guide to Legal Careers.
