A brief overview of the United States federal court system and a discussion of the work performed by three categories of personnel: judicial (magistrate and bankruptcy judges); legal (law clerks and staff attorneys); and administrative (clerks of court and circuit executives). This paper was presented at the Seminar on the Management of the Assistant Personnel to Judges, Changzhou, China, November 22 - 26, 2004. A Mandarin Chinese translation of this paper is available here.