The U.S. proposes giving each Appellate Body Member his/her own law clerk:
... Appellate Body members currently rely on a common pool of Appellate Body Secretariat employees to perform research and manage appeals. However, an Appellate Body member does not have any personal staff dedicated to working on the specific issues of interest to that individual Appellate Body member. Appellate Body members are likely to be senior members of the legal profession, and it is unrealistic to expect them to do all of the basic legal research and drafting to develop their individual views and positions. Such basic work, however, is often required for any adjudicator in any legal system to make an informed decision and fully develop his or her views. While some of these functions have been performed by the Appellate Body Secretariat, we believe the WTO dispute settlement system would benefit if each Appellate Body member were allotted a law clerk. Such an approach would facilitate a more informed debate when Appellate Body members gather to resolve a matter. We note that many legal systems use law clerks to support adjudicators in these functions. If each Appellate Body member had a staff person assigned to that member, each member could be confident that they would have assistance in conducting the research and other work they consider important to their work and elaborating their views. This step would have an ancillary benefit of allowing lawyers in various WTO Members who are early in their careers to get advanced training in WTO law, and help develop a pool of experienced WTO lawyers in Members that do not currently have an extensive number of persons with that expertise. These law clerks could be hired as temporary staff to serve for the term of an individual Appellate Body member and not as part of the permanent WTO Secretariat. We also want to ensure that any action taken on modifying or creating posts is carried out in a manner that is consistent with existing remuneration practices.
Having worked at the Appellate Body, I'm not going to say too much about this, but I don't think I'm divulging any secrets by pointing out that this could result in a significant change in the internal process through which the Appellate Body considers cases.
