Retirement ends 54-year career of longest-serving US court clerk
When Michael Kunz started working as a deputy federal district court clerk in Philadelphia in 1962, the president of the United States was John F. Kennedy.
The IBM Selectric typewriter, with its innovative “golf ball” of typeface characters, was a marvel of modern technology—cellphones and the Internet were unheard of, and even fax machines were not standard business equipment.
Nonetheless, Kunz helped keep a weighty docket of hard-copy antitrust and securities cases under control in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, after becoming the chief clerk of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 1979, he went on in subsequent decades of his 54-year career to deal with the massive multidistrict litigation of asbestos cases, the construction of a new courthouse, court funding issues and establishing protocols for e-filing, e-discovery and public access to online court records, the Legal Intelligencer (sub. req.) reports.
Kunz, the longest-serving clerk in all federal courts in the country, is now planning his retirement, which begins July 1.
Looking back, he considers some of his biggest accomplishments to be the Eastern District’s national reputation as a well-run courthouse—due to its capable and motivated staff—and “smart spending” that helped the court avoid some of the worst consequences of U.S. budget sequestration.
“Since the judiciary has a modest budget, the impact was substantial,” Kunz told the legal publication, referring to the automatic federal spending cuts imposed by sequestration. “The thing I take great pride in was that I didn’t have any employees furloughed or laid off.”
Kunz says he is ready to call it a career and is looking forward to spending more time with his wife, Marleen, and their four daughters and seven grandchildren.
