Author: Lexfolio Team

Once you have graduated you are no longer an intern, and the question changes from where to intern to how to spend the year or two of preparation without losing momentum. For anyone aiming at judicial service there is now a specific reason to care, because the Supreme Court has restored a practice requirement for civil judge recruitment.

Start with that, because it determines everything else about how you plan.

The practice requirement, as it currently stands

The Supreme Court restored the requirement of prior practice for direct entry into judicial service by a judgment of 20 May 2025, and then modified how it applies in review proceedings in Bhumika Trust v. Union of India, reported on 21 August 2026, by a 2:1 majority with Justice Chandran dissenting.

The position that emerged turns on the date of the recruitment notification:

• Notifications issued between 20 May 2025 and 31 March 2027: open to all law graduates, without prior practice. Selected candidates complete one year of training at the State Judicial Academy followed by one year of structured law clerkship, and those two years are treated as equivalent to practice.
• Notifications issued on or after 1 April 2027: candidates need at least one year of actual practice before appearing for the Civil Judge (Junior Division) examination.

The Court also rejected the argument that a post graduate law degree should count as equivalent to practice. An LLM does not substitute for the year.

Two practical consequences. If you intend to sit for notifications issued before April 2027, you can prepare full time. If your realistic first attempt falls after that, you need the practice year to have started, which means joining a chamber and enrolling is part of your exam plan rather than a fallback from it.

State rules differ and notifications are issued state by state, so check the actual notification for the state you are targeting rather than relying on a general summary, including this one.

Enrolment and AIBE come first

You cannot accumulate practice without being enrolled. Enrolment is with the State Bar Council where you intend to practise, it is separate from AIBE, and the documents and timelines differ by state.

AIBE can be taken as a final semester student without backlogs, and for AIBE XXII the examination was held on 29 November 2026 following registration that closed on 27 October 2026. Check the current notification for the cycle you are sitting. There is no limit on attempts, and passing AIBE alone does not permit practice: enrolment and the Certificate of Practice are still required.

Chambers work during preparation

A junior position in a litigation chamber is the normal route, and it has a real advantage for judicial service preparation that is often overlooked: procedure, which is heavily examined, becomes something you have watched rather than something you have memorised. Limitation, jurisdiction, the stages of a suit, framing of issues and execution are much easier to retain once you have seen them go wrong in a live matter.

Be clear eyed about the trade off. Chamber hours are unpredictable, pay in the first year or two is often low and varies enormously between chambers and cities, and a demanding practice will eat your study time. Discuss hours and expectations at the start, and say that you are preparing for judicial service. Many seniors have juniors who do, and some will structure the work around it. A senior who reacts badly to being told is giving you useful information early.

The paid clerkship route

The Supreme Court recruits Law Clerk-cum-Research Associates annually, and this is one of the few genuinely well paid positions open immediately after an LLB.

For the 2026 to 2027 term, the notified terms were:

• Eligibility: a bachelor’s degree in law from an institution recognised by the Bar Council of India. Final year students of three year or five year courses could apply but had to produce proof of the degree before joining.
• Age: 20 to 32 years as on 7 February 2026.
• Remuneration: an initial figure of 1,00,000 rupees per month.
• Selection: three parts. An online multiple choice test with 0.25 negative marking, a subjective written test, then an interview, with shortlisting ratios applied between stages.
• Dates for that cycle: registration from 20 January 2026 to 7 February 2026, examination on 7 March 2026, with a fee of 750 rupees plus bank charges.

Those figures are for that term. The recruitment runs annually, so watch for the next notification on the Supreme Court’s site rather than relying on last year’s numbers.

The work itself, researching for a judge, is close to ideal preparation for judicial service, and several High Courts run comparable schemes with their own eligibility rules.

Keeping your preparation alive

The common failure is not laziness. It is that chamber work expands to fill the day and three months pass with no revision done.

1. Fix the hours in advance, and treat two hours before court as non negotiable rather than planning to study in the evening after a long day.
2. Use the overlap deliberately. When a limitation point or a procedural objection comes up in a matter, read the provision properly that night. This is revision disguised as work.
3. Keep one weekly session for the subjects your work never touches, usually language papers, local laws and the general knowledge components.
4. Write full answers weekly. Mains answer writing is the thing working candidates drop first and lose on.
5. Fix a review point every three months. If your preparation has genuinely stalled, decide whether to reduce the work rather than carrying on and failing at both.

If you want to keep a writing habit going during this period without taking on more hours, Lexfolio runs a short virtual internship producing published legal writing, which is lighter than a chamber commitment and keeps your drafting active.

The honest summary: check the notification date for your state, enrol early, and decide deliberately whether this is a full time preparation year or a practice year with preparation inside it. The students who struggle are usually the ones who never made that choice and drifted into doing both badly.

If you are doing an LLM and finding that internship listings do not seem to fit you, that is not your imagination. A great many student internships in India are framed for candidates enrolled in a three year or five year LLB, and LLM candidates are either not mentioned or not eligible. Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, for example, has historically framed its internship eligibility around students of recognised LLB programmes.

So the LLM path is a different one, and it is worth understanding what it is before you spend a term sending applications into the wrong channel.

What is actually open to you

• Research assistantships with faculty. The most reliable route and the most undersubscribed. Professors running funded projects need people who can read, summarise and cite properly, and an LLM student is better suited to that than a second year LLB. Ask your own faculty first and be specific about the area.
• Research centres attached to law schools. Centres working on communication governance, constitutional law, criminal justice, competition and similar areas take research interns, and they assess on writing rather than on year of study.
• Policy organisations and think tanks. Written output is the currency. Check each organisation’s eligibility criteria individually, because they vary and some are LLB only.
• Teaching assistance. If you intend to go into academia, this is worth more than another internship certificate.
• Chambers and firms, which will usually take you, though they may slot you alongside LLB interns and give you the same work. Worth doing if you have no litigation exposure, less so if you already have a few.

Your application is judged differently

An LLB intern is assessed on potential. You are assessed on what you can produce now, which cuts both ways: more is expected, but the things that are expected are things you can actually control.

The writing sample is the application. Not the CV, not the college. A research organisation deciding between candidates reads the sample and little else. If yours is a seminar paper, edit it down before sending, because an unedited 8,000 word submission is often not read at all.

Your dissertation area is your pitch. Write to people working in that area and say what you are working on. This is a far stronger opening than a general expression of interest, and it is available to you in a way it was not during your LLB.

Published work carries real weight in research and academic settings, more than in a firm. If you have nothing published, a case comment or a short explainer is the quickest route to having something. Lexfolio publishes student and researcher writing with no submission or publication fee through its call for blogs, and you keep the copyright.

One thing to be clear about: an LLM is not practice

This matters if you are considering judicial service, and a great many LLM students are.

The Supreme Court has held that a post graduate degree in law is not equivalent to practice at the Bar for the purposes of Civil Judge (Junior Division) recruitment. In Bhumika Trust v. Union of India, decided on review and reported on 21 August 2026, the Court declined by a 2:1 majority to treat post graduation as equivalent to the practice requirement, with Justice Chandran dissenting.

The practical position that emerged is that recruitment notifications issued between 20 May 2025 and 31 March 2027 are open to all law graduates, with selected candidates completing a year of training at a State Judicial Academy followed by a year of structured clerkship. For notifications issued on or after 1 April 2027, candidates need at least one year of actual practice before appearing.

If judicial service is your plan, do not assume your LLM will substitute for that year. Check the notification for your state and its date carefully.

Questions to ask before you accept

LLM internships are more variable in quality than LLB ones, because there is no settled expectation of what an LLM intern does. Ask before you commit:

1. What is the output? A report, a chapter, a literature review, a brief. If nobody can tell you, the work is probably unstructured.
2. Will my name appear on it? Attribution practice varies and is much easier to settle at the start than at the end.
3. Who supervises, and how often will they read my work? Research work without feedback is just unpaid labour.
4. Is there a stipend? Many research internships are unpaid and some pay a basic stipend. Ask plainly; it is a normal question.
5. Can I use this material in my dissertation? Agree it in advance if the subject overlaps.

If the plan is a PhD or teaching

The LLM year is the one in which a doctoral application is either built or missed, and internships are not what builds it. What a PhD admission committee or a department looks at is a research proposal that holds together, some evidence that you can sustain an argument at length, and an academic who will vouch for your research rather than for your diligence.

That points to a different use of the year: get your dissertation to a standard where a chapter of it could be submitted somewhere, present at one conference if you can, and keep a working relationship with a supervisor who reads your drafts closely. A research assistantship with a faculty member serves this better than any external internship, because it generates exactly the relationship and the output you will need.

If you are also considering teaching, note that eligibility for assistant professor posts in India runs through UGC NET or an equivalent, which is a separate exam with its own cycle. Plan it alongside the dissertation rather than after it.

A reasonable plan for the LLM year

• One research engagement in your dissertation area, long enough to produce something citable.
• One published piece under your own name.
• A relationship with at least one academic who can speak about your research, which is what matters for a PhD application or a teaching post.
• If you are heading to the Bar or the bench instead, one litigation exposure and a clear reading of the current practice requirement for your state.

The common mistake is to spend the LLM year collecting the same internships you did during the LLB. The degree buys you a year of concentrated research time, and that is the thing you cannot get back later.

Final year is not for exploring. You have one or two vacations left, and they should go towards converting a place that already knows you, not sampling somewhere new. Alongside that, there are three administrative things that will block you from practising if you leave them late.

Deal with the administration first, because it has hard deadlines and the rest does not.

1. Audit your BCI internship weeks

Do this in the first month of final year. Rule 25 of the BCI Legal Education Rules requires 12 weeks of internship across the whole of a three year LLB and 20 weeks across a five year course. It also requires at least one internship with trial and appellate advocates during the course, and caps any single continuous internship at four weeks in a year.

Three things go wrong at this stage, every year, in every college:

• The weeks do not add up and there is one vacation left to make up a shortfall.
• The weeks add up but there is no trial and appellate internship among them.
• Everything was done but the certificate from second year was never collected and the chamber has changed its staff.

Count them now, on paper, and chase the missing certificates while you still have a year.

2. AIBE

You do not have to wait until you graduate. Final semester students without backlogs can register for and sit the All India Bar Examination, and must clear the final semester before the results and before enrolment for practice.

For AIBE XXII, registration opened on 19 August 2026 and closed on 27 October 2026, with the examination on 29 November 2026. Those dates are for that cycle, so check the current notification on the Bar Council of India’s AIBE site rather than relying on a figure from an article.

Two points students regularly get wrong. Passing AIBE does not by itself entitle you to practise: you still need enrolment with a State Bar Council and the Certificate of Practice. And there is no cap on attempts, so sitting it early and failing costs you nothing but the fee.

3. Enrolment with your State Bar Council

Enrolment is a separate process from AIBE, handled by the State Bar Council where you intend to practise, and it has its own forms, fees, documents and timelines that differ by state. Find out what yours requires during final year, not after your results. The usual delay is a document from the university that takes weeks to obtain.

Converting an internship into an offer

The internship that matters in final year is the one at a place that has already had you once or twice. In firm recruitment this later internship is often described as an assessment internship, meaning the firm is deciding whether to make a pre placement offer rather than simply hosting you.

The pattern reported by students who receive such offers is that they are interning with that firm for the third time, occasionally the second. Fewer than one in ten interns is called back even once. So if you are in final year with no repeat internship anywhere, the honest position is that a pre placement offer is unlikely and your effort is better spent elsewhere.

If you do have a repeat internship lined up, treat it differently from your earlier ones:

1. Ask directly whether it is an assessment internship. Many students never ask and spend four weeks guessing. If it is, you will be told what is expected.
2. Produce finished work, not drafts. A note that needs no rewriting is the thing being looked for.
3. Get known to a partner or senior, not only to associates. Offers are usually decided by people who need to have seen your work themselves.
4. Ask about the timeline before you leave. When decisions are made, and whether you should follow up.

If there is no offer coming

This is the position most final year students are in, including many very good ones, and it is worth saying plainly that it is not a verdict on your ability. The number of entry level offers at large firms is small relative to the number of students who want them.

The realistic alternatives, all of which people build careers from:

• Join a litigation chamber as a junior. The pay in the first years is often low and varies enormously, but the training is real and independent practice starts here.
• In house legal teams at companies, which recruit outside the firm cycle and are far more open to applications from outside the national law schools.
• Smaller and regional firms, where you will do substantive work much earlier than a junior associate at a large firm.
• Judicial service preparation, which has its own eligibility rules that changed recently and should be checked against the current position for your state.
• Policy and research organisations, if your record and writing point that way.

Line up your references before you need them

Almost every application you make after graduation, to a chamber, an in house team, a clerkship or a research post, will ask for someone who can speak about your work. Final year is when those people are still easy to reach and still remember you.

You want two, and they should be people who supervised actual work rather than the most senior person whose name you can drop. Write to each of them during final year, remind them what you worked on, say what you are applying for, and ask whether they are willing to be named. Doing this in advance also means you are not scrambling to explain yourself to a half remembered supervisor on the day an application is due.

Keep their current email and phone number in the same file as your certificates. Chambers move, associates leave firms, and a reference you cannot contact is not a reference.

The final year checklist

• BCI weeks counted, shortfall identified, certificates collected.
• Trial and appellate internship done, or scheduled.
• AIBE registration tracked against the current notification.
• State Bar Council enrolment requirements obtained in writing.
• One repeat internship at a place that knows you, if one is available.
• Two people who will take a call about you by name.

Six things. They are not difficult individually, and all of them become much harder in the three months after your results.

By third year, collecting one internship each in a different field stops helping you. Somebody reading your CV should be able to say what you are interested in within ten seconds. This is the year to go deep in one or two areas, return to places that already know you, and build a written record.

It is also the year the arithmetic becomes visible, so it is worth stating plainly.

The numbers, honestly

More than a thousand law students intern at the top ten firms each year, and those firms make somewhere in the region of twenty to fifty entry level offers annually. Fewer than one in ten interns is called back for a second internship at the same firm. Most students who eventually receive a pre placement offer are interning with that firm for the third time.

Two conclusions follow. First, a single internship at a large firm is close to meaningless on its own, so treat it as the opening of a relationship rather than an achievement. Second, the students who convert are the ones who went back, which means your effort is better spent on being asked to return than on adding a new name.

None of this means a large firm is the only worthwhile destination. Litigation chambers, policy organisations and in house teams run on reputation and repeat contact in exactly the same way.

Building a specialisation that is visible

A specialisation in third year does not mean you have decided your life. It means that your internships, your writing and your electives point roughly the same way.

Pick an area with enough live material to work on. Criminal law under the new codes, data protection and the DPDP Act, insolvency, arbitration, competition, service law and constitutional litigation all qualify. Then do three things in that area over the year:

1. Intern twice in it, preferably once at the same place.
2. Write in it. A case comment or an explainer on a recent development. Published work in your area is the clearest signal available that your interest is real and not something you typed into a cover letter.
3. Take the elective, or read the standard text if your college does not offer one.

If you want somewhere to publish, Lexfolio accepts student writing with no submission or publication fee, through its virtual internship or as a direct submission, and published pieces carry your byline.

How to get asked back

The callback is the whole game in third year, and it is mostly decided by behaviour that has nothing to do with how clever you are.

• Deliver early and in the format asked. If a note is wanted by Thursday, send it Wednesday evening. Late and brilliant loses to prompt and sound, every time.
• Ask for feedback once, in the middle. Not at the end, when it is too late to act on. Ask what you could do better for the rest of the internship, and then visibly do it.
• Be useful on the dull work. Indexing a brief, checking citations, preparing a chronology. These are the tasks that reveal whether you are reliable, which is what is actually being assessed.
• Make yourself known to more than one person. A recommendation from an associate helps. A partner or senior who has seen your work matters more.
• Say that you want to come back. Explicitly, before you leave.

Timing your applications

Popular chambers and firms fill vacation slots well before the vacation. Write early rather than when your exams finish, and apply for the winter break by around the start of the preceding semester, and for the summer by the middle of the academic year. Exact practice varies a great deal between firms and cities, so ask anyone a year ahead of you what the pattern was where they applied.

Keep the vacation restriction in mind. The 2014 Bar Council circular directs that internships be taken during vacations, and it was upheld by the Madhya Pradesh High Court in 2022, so your available windows are fixed and well known to everyone you are competing with.

Check your BCI weeks now, not in final year

Rule 25 requires 12 weeks of internship across a three year LLB and 20 weeks across a five year course, and separately requires at least one internship with trial and appellate advocates. Any single continuous internship in a year is capped at four weeks.

Count what you have, in writing, this year. Students discover the shortfall in final year with one vacation left and no certificate from a chamber they interned at two years ago. Collect the missing certificates while people still remember you.

If you are in third year with none of this

A fair number of students reach third year with one internship, no writing and no repeat anywhere, usually because nobody told them any of the above in first year. The position is recoverable, but only if you stop trying to catch up on breadth.

Do one thing well instead. Take a single area, do one internship in it this vacation, write one piece in it, and go back to the same place next vacation. That gives you a repeat internship and a specialisation by the time you finish third year, which is most of what the record needs to show. Trying to add four new names in one year produces a CV that says nothing and leaves nobody who can speak for you.

What a strong third year looks like

• Two internships, at least one of them a return to a place from second year.
• One substantive piece of work you could show someone, with the confidential parts removed.
• One or two published pieces in your chosen area.
• Two people who know your work well enough to recommend you by name.
• A written tally of your BCI weeks with certificates filed.

That record is what final year recruitment reads. It cannot be assembled in final year, which is the entire reason third year matters more than it feels like it does at the time.

Second year is when an internship stops being a tour and starts being work. You have done contracts, torts and constitutional law, which means somebody can hand you a research question and expect an answer. Your goal this year is one internship where you produce something real, and a first attempt at choosing a direction.

You do not have to decide your career. You do have to stop applying to everything at once, because an application that could have been sent to anybody reads like it was.

Pick a direction, loosely

There are broadly four and you should sample two of them across your second and third years.

• Litigation. A chamber or a court practice. You see procedure, drafting and clients. Rule 25 of the BCI Legal Education Rules requires at least one internship with trial and appellate advocates during your course, so this is going to happen at some point regardless.
• Corporate and transactional. Law firms, in house teams. Due diligence, contract review, research notes. Harder to get in second year but not impossible at smaller and mid size firms.
• Policy and research. Think tanks, research centres attached to law schools, organisations working on legislative and regulatory questions. Writing heavy, and they care about your writing sample more than your college.
• Public interest and legal aid. NGOs, clinics, organisations doing rights work. Often the most responsibility a second year will be given anywhere.

Choose on the basis of what you want to find out, not what sounds prestigious. The honest question is: do I want to be in court, in a document, or in an argument about what the law should be?

What changes in your application this year

Your CV now has a first internship on it and a few subjects worth naming. Three things improve the application.

A writing sample. This is the single biggest upgrade available to you, and most second years do not have one. Policy organisations and research centres often ask for one directly. Even where it is not asked, attaching a short, clean piece of legal writing separates you immediately.

If you have nothing to attach, write something. A case comment on a recent judgment is the standard form and takes a weekend. Lexfolio publishes student writing free of charge through its call for blogs, and a published piece under your own name is a sample you can send anywhere.

A specific reason for writing to them. In first year “I want to learn” was acceptable. Now it is not. Name the practice area, the matter type, or the kind of work the person does, and say why it interests you in one sentence. This takes ten minutes of reading their website or their reported matters.

Exact dates. Say which weeks you are available, in the first two lines. Many applications are rejected purely because the dates do not fit and nobody wants to run a correspondence to find out.

Remember the vacation restriction. The 2014 BCI circular directs colleges to permit internships during vacations only, and the Madhya Pradesh High Court upheld it in 2022. Offering to intern during term is likely to be refused and marks you out as someone who has not read the rules.

Doing research work properly

At some point this year somebody will give you a question. How you answer it decides whether you are asked back, and almost everything else about the internship is noise by comparison.

1. Clarify before you start. Ask what the answer is for. A note for a client, a point in a draft and a question of strategy need different things. Two minutes of asking saves two days of the wrong work.
2. Go to the primary source. The bare Act, the judgment itself, the notification. Not a blog summary, not a coaching note, and not an AI answer you have not checked. Lawyers can tell, and one fabricated citation ends your credibility permanently.
3. Answer in the first line. Open with the conclusion, then the authority, then the qualifications. Do not build up to it.
4. Keep it to a page unless asked otherwise. A long note is usually a sign that the researcher has not decided what matters.
5. Say what you could not find. If the point is unsettled or you could not locate authority, write that plainly. Pretending otherwise is worse than being incomplete.

Getting called back

A second internship at the same place is worth more than a first internship somewhere new, because it means somebody chose you twice. Call backs are also the entry point to the longer process by which firms eventually make offers.

Ask before you leave. On the last day, tell the person who supervised you that you would like to come back, and ask whether you may write to them for the next vacation. Most students never say this and then wonder why nobody invites them.

Then write when you said you would, to the same person, referring to what you worked on. This is unglamorous and it works far more often than cold applications do.

A realistic plan for the year

• One internship in the winter break and one in the summer, four weeks each, in two different areas.
• One piece of published or publishable writing, to use as a sample.
• One place you would be happy to return to, and an email sent asking to return.
• Certificates collected on the last day of each, not chased in third year.

That is a good second year. It is also considerably more than most of your batch will do, and it compounds, because third year applications are judged on exactly this.

Yes, you can intern in your first year, and most first years who try do find something. But set your expectations correctly: a big law firm is not going to take you, and chasing one will waste the summer. What is open to you is a trial advocate’s chamber, a district court practice, an NGO or a legal aid clinic. That is the right place to start anyway.

The purpose of a first year internship is not to decorate your CV. It is to find out what the practice of law actually looks like, so that the subjects you study for the next four years attach to something real.

Check the rules before you apply

Two things govern when and where you can intern.

Vacations only. The Bar Council of India issued a circular in 2014 directing colleges to send students on internships only during vacations, not while the academic session is running. A law student challenged it and the Madhya Pradesh High Court dismissed the petition in Abhishek Sharma v. Bar Council of India, reported as 2022 LiveLaw (MP) 263. The court said the restriction protects students from having to sacrifice their academic term. So plan around your winter and summer breaks.

Total weeks and the four week cap. Rule 25 of the BCI Legal Education Rules requires 12 weeks of internship across the whole of a three year LLB, and 20 weeks across a five year course. There is a proviso that caps any single continuous internship at four weeks in a year. You do not need to finish a large share of this in first year. You do need to know the clock has started.

Where first years actually get taken

• A trial advocate’s chamber in your own city. The most useful first internship and the easiest to get. You will see hearings, adjournments, filing and clients, which is most of what litigation is.
• District court practice. Similar, and often through the same route. Rule 25 separately requires every student to complete at least one internship with trial and appellate advocates at some point, so this also counts toward a requirement you cannot avoid later.
• Legal aid clinics and NGOs. Many take first years because the work is document heavy and supervised. Rule 25 lists NGOs among the permitted places.
• Your own college’s legal aid cell, if it has one. Easy to arrange and genuinely counts.

Who will not take you: the large corporate firms, Supreme Court senior counsel, and most policy organisations. They receive more applications from third and final years than they can read. This is not a comment on you.

Applying when your CV is empty

Your CV in first year is one page with your school marks, your college, and whatever you did before law school. That is fine. Nobody expects more. What matters is the email.

Write to a named person, not to an office. Find advocates through your college’s alumni list, your family’s acquaintances, the local bar association, or by simply reading cause lists and looking up who appears regularly in the matters that interest you.

Keep the email to five sentences. Say who you are and which year, say exactly which weeks you are free, say why you are writing to that person in particular, and attach the CV. Do not write a paragraph about your passion for justice. Advocates read a great many of these.

Send twenty of these, not three. The reply rate is low and has nothing to do with your worth as a candidate.

If nothing comes through, a remote option is better than an empty summer. Lexfolio runs a four week virtual internship where you research and write a piece that gets published under your own name, which also gives you something concrete to show next year.

What you will actually do

Expect to spend the first few days watching and understanding very little. Proceedings in district courts are often in Hindi or the state language, and the vocabulary is unfamiliar even if the language is not. This is normal and it passes.

Over four weeks you can reasonably expect to sit in on hearings, read case files, photocopy and organise documents, accompany a clerk to the filing counter, and if you are useful, be asked to look something up.

The last of these is the one that matters. If an advocate asks you to find a provision or check whether a point is covered, do it properly and hand back something short and clear. That is how a first year becomes a second year who gets called back.

Four habits that make the difference

1. Carry a notebook and write everything down. Terms you do not know, section numbers mentioned in passing, the order in which a hearing proceeds. Look them up in the evening.
2. Learn the stages of a civil suit and a criminal trial. Plaint, written statement, issues, evidence, arguments, judgment, execution. Once you have this skeleton, everything you watch has a place to sit.
3. Use the court library. Most district courts have one, and almost no intern walks in. Bare acts, journals and law reports are there.
4. Ask one good question a day. Not many. Pick the thing you understood least, and ask when the advocate is not mid hearing.

What not to worry about in first year

Whether it was a famous name. Whether you got a certificate on letterhead. Whether your batchmate is interning somewhere that sounds grander. None of this will matter in three years.

What will matter is whether you can read a file, follow a hearing, and write a note that somebody can use. Those take time to build, which is exactly why starting in first year is worth doing even when the internship itself looks modest.

One practical point before you finish: ask for a certificate or a signed letter on the last day, even from a small chamber. Your university will ask for proof when it counts your weeks, and getting it later is much harder than getting it then.

Under Rule 25 of the Bar Council of India’s Legal Education Rules 2008, a three year LLB student must complete a minimum of 12 weeks of internship across the whole degree, and a five year student must complete 20 weeks. No single internship in any year may run for a continuous period of more than four weeks. At least one internship must be with trial and appellate advocates.

Those are the national minimums. How your university records them, what paperwork it wants and what it will accept differs considerably from one institution to another, so the rule is only half the answer.

What the rule says

• Three year stream: at least 12 weeks of internship during the entire period of legal studies.
• Five year stream: at least 20 weeks.
• Cap on continuous duration: an internship in any year cannot run for a continuous period of more than four weeks.
• At least one internship with trial and appellate advocates during the academic period.
• An internship diary is to be maintained in the form stipulated by the university concerned.

The four week cap is the part students most often get wrong. A single eight week placement does not satisfy the rule as one internship, which is why the requirement is normally met as a series of four week stints across different vacations.

Where you may intern

The rule contemplates a wide range of placements, not only law firms. It refers to non governmental organisations, trial and appellate advocates, the judiciary, legal regulatory authorities, legislatures and Parliament, other legal functionaries, market institutions, law firms, companies and local self government bodies.

This is worth knowing if you are struggling to get a firm internship. A placement with a legal aid organisation, a district court advocate, a company’s in house team or a regulator is contemplated by the rule and is often more instructive for a junior student than being one of many interns at a large firm.

The internship diary

Rule 25 requires a diary in the form the university stipulates. It is evaluated by the Guide in Internship together with a core faculty member each time, and the total mark is assessed in the final semester as part of the fourth clinical course.

In practice this means two things. Keep the diary as you go, because reconstructing four weeks of work in September from memory produces a document that reads exactly like what it is. And get your university’s prescribed format before you start, since a diary in the wrong form may have to be redone.

You will also need a certificate from the organisation. Ask for it on the last day, on letterhead, with your exact dates and a line about the work you did. Chasing an advocate for a certificate three months later is unpleasant for everyone.

The vacation restriction

In 2014 the Bar Council issued a circular directing universities and colleges to send students for internships only during vacations, not during the academic session. It was addressed to registrars, principals and state bar council secretaries.

The circular was challenged and survived. In Abhishek Sharma v. Bar Council of India, reported as 2022 LiveLaw (MP) 263, the Gwalior Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, comprising Justice Rohit Arya and Justice Milind Ramesh Phadke, dismissed the writ petition, reasoning that the restriction protects students from having to sacrifice academic sessions in order to complete internships.

The practical consequence is simple: plan your internships around your college’s vacation calendar, and do not assume a term time internship will be counted.

Practice varies by university, and that governs you

The Bar Council sets the floor. Your university builds on it, and what it requires is what you must satisfy. Institutions differ on:

• The prescribed diary format and how much detail it wants
• Whether prior approval of the organisation is needed before you join
• How many weeks are expected in each year of the course
• Whether a viva or a presentation follows the internship
• Whether remote or online placements are accepted at all

Get your university’s internship guidelines in writing from the clinical course faculty or the academic office, and read them before you accept a placement. Where the university’s requirement is stricter than the Bar Council minimum, the university’s requirement is the one that decides whether you graduate on time.

Online and virtual internships

Whether a remote or online programme counts toward Rule 25 is not settled uniformly, and universities take different views. Some accept remote placements with a proper certificate, others require physical attendance, particularly for the mandatory placement with trial and appellate advocates.

Treat any online programme as useful experience rather than as a guaranteed credit, and confirm with your own faculty before relying on it. Lexfolio’s own virtual internship is run on exactly that basis: it is an internship with an independent legal education publisher, it produces published writing under your name and a certificate stating what you did, and it does not claim to replace whatever your university requires.

A sensible plan

1. Get your university’s internship guidelines and diary format in your first year.
2. Spread the weeks across vacations rather than leaving them to the final year.
3. Make sure at least one placement is with trial and appellate advocates.
4. Vary the type: a chamber, a firm, an NGO or regulator, an in house team.
5. Keep the diary during the internship, not afterwards.
6. Collect the certificate before you leave.

A corporate law firm internship in India is mostly research, due diligence and drafting, done at a desk, to deadlines set by associates you may barely meet. Published accounts of the large firms describe exactly this, with the balance differing by firm and by the team you are put in, and with some clerical work included almost everywhere.

It is office work rather than court work. If you are deciding between a chamber and a corporate firm, that difference matters more than the brand on the door.

What the work consists of

Research

The largest part of most corporate internships. You are given a question, often narrow and without much background, and asked for a note. The answer wanted is short, sourced and clear about its own limits: the provision, the position, the authority for it, and what remains uncertain.

Accounts of internships at firms including Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and Luthra and Luthra describe research as the dominant task, so a student who cannot write a tight note will struggle regardless of their marks.

Due diligence

Due diligence is the exercise of examining a company’s documents before a transaction, to find what might affect the deal. As an intern you will typically be given a data room folder and a checklist, and asked to go through a category of documents and record what you find.

In practice that means reading leases, employment agreements, licences, loan documents or litigation records, and noting dates, parties, obligations, termination rights, change of control clauses and anything that looks irregular. The work is repetitive and it is also where mistakes are expensive, because a missed clause in a lease becomes a problem for the client months later. Trilegal’s internships are described as combining research with due diligence of this kind.

Drafting and document review

Interns are rarely given a contract to draft from scratch. You are more likely to be marking up a standard form, comparing two versions of an agreement, preparing a schedule or an annexure, or putting together the first cut of a compliance checklist. The skill being tested is care rather than creativity.

Clerical work

Formatting, compiling, scanning, proof reading, collating signature pages. Published accounts of several large firms mention clerical tasks explicitly, including Luthra and Luthra and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas. Interns who treat it as beneath them are noticed, and not favourably.

How assignments reach you

Usually from an associate rather than a partner, often by email or a message, often with less context than you would like. You are expected to ask for the context you need and then not ask again.

How much work you get depends on how the first assignments go. At some firms the workload is openly described as performance linked: do well and more arrives, do poorly and the flow quietly stops. An intern sitting idle for three days is usually not being rested.

What they are judging

• Whether the deadline is met. Late is the fault that is remembered.
• Whether the answer is correct and checked. Citations must be real and current.
• Whether it is readable. A note that needs rewriting has not saved anyone time.
• Whether you flag what you are unsure about rather than papering over it.
• Whether you are easy to work with. Interns are in a room with other people’s deadlines.

At some firms the assessment is formalised before you even arrive: Trilegal applicants have been asked to complete legal assessments requiring research and a view on the likely outcome.

Hours

Longer and less predictable than a nine to five, particularly when a transaction is closing. Published accounts describe demanding deadlines rather than fixed hours, and the honest position is that it varies by firm, by team and by what is live that week. Expect to stay late sometimes and to have quiet days too.

How to prepare

• Know the Companies Act 2013 and the Indian Contract Act 1872 well enough to find your way around them quickly.
• Be able to use a legal database properly, including searching by section and tracing whether a judgment is still good law.
• Learn your word processor. Styles, tracked changes, comparing two documents, generating a table of contents. This sounds trivial and it will save you hours.
• Practise the research note format before you arrive: question, short answer, reasoning, authorities, caveats.

Which team you land in matters more than the firm

Large firms are divided into practice areas, and your experience is shaped far more by the team you are placed with than by the firm’s name. Published accounts of AZB and Partners describe work usually falling within the practice area the intern chose, while accounts of Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas describe the work as depending on the team. At Trilegal, assignments may come from any practice area.

Where a firm asks for a preference, give one and give a reason for it. Where it does not, ask on the first day who you are sitting with and what that team does. An intern who knows whether they are in general corporate, banking, disputes or competition can ask sensible questions. An intern who does not spends the month confused about why the work looks nothing like what they expected.

What to do when there is no work

Quiet stretches happen, particularly in the first week and after a transaction closes. The wrong response is to sit and wait visibly, and the other wrong response is to message four associates at once.

Ask the person who gave you your last assignment whether anything else is coming. If not, read: the firm’s published client updates, the statute underlying the matter you just worked on, or the documents in the folder you were given that you were not asked to review. Interns who use quiet time on the subject matter are noticeably better by the end of the month, and it is usually obvious to the people around them.

Stipends and what to ask

Practice varies widely and some firms link the stipend to the quality of the work. Rather than relying on figures you read on a forum, ask the firm directly once you have an offer, since the answer differs by firm, by city and by year.

Is it the right internship for you

If you want to see how transactions are built, how risk is written into a contract, and how large organisations are advised, this is the internship to do. If what draws you to law is argument, facts and courtrooms, do a litigation internship first and come to corporate work with something to compare it against. Most students benefit from trying both before their final year, and the four week cap on any single placement under the Bar Council rules makes alternating entirely practical.

A litigation internship under an advocate means early mornings at court, a great deal of reading, running between filing counters and court rooms, and drafting that gets heavily corrected. You will not argue anything. What you will get, if you are useful, is a view of how a matter actually moves from a client’s problem to an order, which no classroom teaches.

What a day usually looks like

Court hours set the day. Most courts sit from the morning until the afternoon with a lunch break, so the chamber’s rhythm is built around being in court in the morning and doing the paperwork afterwards.

A typical day for an intern runs something like this. You reach the chamber or the court before the advocate. You carry the files for the day’s board and keep them in order. You sit through the matters, note what the judge said and what the next date is. After the board rises you go back to the chamber, where the research and drafting of the afternoon is set. Somewhere in there you will be sent to a filing counter, a copying section or another court.

Listing is unpredictable. A matter may be reached at eleven or not at all, and days get rearranged without notice. Interns who treat this as disorganisation misunderstand it, and interns who learn to read a cause list become useful within a week.

The work you will actually be given

Reading the file

The first task in most chambers is to read a brief and summarise it. This is not a make work exercise. A chamber wants to know whether you can extract the facts, the dates and the issue from a disordered bundle, and whether your summary can be trusted.

Research

You will be asked for authorities on a point, usually with little context and a short deadline. What is wanted is a short note with the proposition, the cases that support it, the paragraph numbers, and honestly, the cases that go the other way. An intern who hides the adverse authority is worse than useless, because the other side will find it.

Drafting

Depending on the chamber and on how you have done so far, you may be asked to draft a legal notice, a reply, an application for exemption, a short affidavit or parts of a petition. Expect your draft to come back with most of it struck through. That is the method, and the second draft is where you learn.

Court craft and errands

Filing, taking out certified copies, checking the board, finding out which court a matter has gone to, getting a date noted. These feel menial and they are also how a litigation practice physically works. Every advocate in the chamber has done them.

What you should bring

• A notebook and pen. Not a phone. Taking notes on a phone in court reads badly and in many courts is not allowed.
• Court appropriate clothes. White shirt, black trousers or a black and white salwar suit or saree, black shoes. Many courts and Bar associations enforce this.
• Your own identification for entry, and patience with security.
• Water and something to eat. Days run long and unpredictably.

How to be the intern who gets asked back

The bar is lower than students think, and it is mostly about reliability.

• Be early. Court does not wait and neither does the advocate.
• Write down every instruction. Asking twice is fine. Guessing is not.
• Give a deadline you can meet and tell the senior early if you cannot, rather than at the hour it was due.
• Say when you do not know. A confident wrong answer about what a section says can cause real damage.
• Check every citation. Confirm the case exists, the paragraph says what you claim, and it has not been overruled.
• Keep client matters to yourself. Nothing from the file goes on social media, including a photograph of the chamber with papers visible.

On stipends

Many litigation internships are unpaid, and there is no rule requiring otherwise. Commentators have pointed out that India’s labour statutes, including the Industrial Disputes Act 1947 and the Minimum Wages Act 1948, are generally understood not to cover interns, because the definitions of workman and employee do not extend to them, and that the Bar Council rules on internships set requirements without addressing pay.

In practice some chambers pay a modest amount or cover travel, some pay nothing, and almost none advertise either way. Ask politely before you join if the answer matters to your plans, and budget for travel and lunch in a city where you may be staying for a month.

District court and High Court internships differ

A district court chamber usually puts you closer to the facts. There are more matters, more clients in the room, more evidence and cross examination, and more of the ordinary machinery of litigation: filing, service, adjournments, execution. For a student who has never seen a trial, this is the more instructive place to start.

A High Court chamber tends to be more about the written word. Matters arrive on paper, arguments turn on points of law, and the drafting is more demanding. You may see less of a client and more of a brief. Research work is usually heavier and the authorities matter more.

Neither is better. If you can manage both across different vacations, do that, because the comparison teaches you more than either alone.

What to read before you start

• The procedural code that governs the chamber’s work. For a criminal practice, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023 and its predecessor provisions, since both numbers are still in daily use. For a civil practice, the Code of Civil Procedure 1908, particularly the Orders on pleadings and interim relief.
• The Limitation Act 1963, at least well enough to know that time runs and where to look it up.
• A few recent judgments of the court you will be sitting in, so the names and the style of the orders are familiar.

You are not expected to know the law. You are expected to be able to follow what is being discussed and to look things up quickly.

What you take away

Three things, if the internship goes well. A sense of what the paperwork of a real matter looks like, which makes procedure papers stop being abstract. A few drafts with your senior’s corrections on them, which are worth keeping. And a person who can speak to your work, which is how most litigation juniors are eventually hired.

Ask for a certificate at the end, on the chamber’s letterhead, with your dates and the kind of work you did, because your university will want it for your internship record.

A law student CV with no internships should still run to a full page, and the space is filled with your education, moots, clinical work, research, publications, languages and anything you have organised or taught. What it should not contain is a career objective, a photograph, or a list of adjectives about yourself.

Everyone reading your CV knows you are in your first or second year. Nobody expects a work history. What they are checking is whether you can write, whether you have done anything that required effort, and whether you will be a nuisance to supervise.

The structure that works

1. Name and contact details
2. Education
3. Moots, mediation and other competitions
4. Research and publications
5. Clinical and practical work
6. Positions of responsibility
7. Skills and languages

Order these by what is strongest for you. If you have a published article and one moot, publications go above moots. The weakest section goes last, and if a section has nothing in it, delete the heading rather than padding it.

The top of the page

Name, phone, email, city. A LinkedIn link if the profile is complete. That is all. No photograph, no date of birth, no father’s name, no marital status, none of which belongs on a professional CV even though many Indian templates include them.

Delete the career objective. “To secure a challenging position in a reputed organisation where I can utilise my skills” appears on thousands of CVs and conveys nothing. The top third of the page is the most valuable space you have, so spend it on education.

Education

Programme, university, years, and your marks or CGPA if they are respectable. If your CGPA is weak, leave it out rather than explaining it, and let the rest of the CV carry the application.

Name two or three subjects only if they are relevant to the firm you are writing to. A student applying to a litigation chamber can usefully mention Criminal Procedure and Evidence. The same student applying to a corporate firm should mention Contracts and Company Law instead. This means your CV is not one document but a base document you adjust.

What counts as experience when you have none

Moots

Name the competition, the year, your role and the stage you reached. A quarter final is worth stating. So is “researcher” if that is what you were, and claiming to have been a speaker when you were not is the kind of thing that unravels in conversation.

Clinical course work

Your legal aid clinic and drafting papers produce real documents. A line reading “drafted a plaint, a written statement and a bail application as part of the clinical course, assessed by faculty” tells a litigation chamber precisely what it wants to know, which is that you have seen the inside of a draft before.

Research

Research assistance for a professor, a project for a centre, a dissertation in progress, or a paper presented at a conference. State the topic in a few words, since the subject matter is often what makes a reader stop.

Publications

A published piece is the single most useful thing a junior student can have on a CV, because it is evidence of writing rather than a claim about it. Blog posts on established legal sites count, as do student journals and newspaper opinion pieces. Give the title, the publication and the date, and link it if the CV will be read on a screen.

If you have nothing yet, this is the most fixable gap on the list. Several legal sites publish student writing without charging a fee, and Lexfolio is one of them: you can submit an article for publication at no cost, and a published piece with your byline gives you both a CV line and a writing sample to attach to applications.

Positions and organising

Moot court committee, a society you ran, an event you organised, a team you coached, tutoring you have done. These show you can be relied on, which for an intern matters more than most students expect.

Skills and languages

Languages are worth real money in litigation. If you read and write Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil or Telugu, say so, because an intern who can read a vernacular record or a police document is immediately useful in a way that a monolingual intern is not.

Under skills, list things that are verifiable: legal databases you have actually used, typing in a particular script, a software you genuinely know. Leave out “team player”, “quick learner” and “excellent communication skills”, all of which are unverifiable and all of which the reader has seen a thousand times.

Format and length

• One page until you have several internships. A two page student CV signals padding.
• PDF, always, named with your own name.
• One serif or sans serif face at eleven or twelve point. No colour blocks, no icons, no skill bars showing you are 80 per cent at research.
• Reverse chronological within each section.
• Consistent dates, for example June 2026, not 06/26 in one line and June ’26 in the next.

Before you send it

Read it aloud, which catches the sentences that do not work. Check every date and every spelling of every institution. Ask one senior to read it, since they will spot in a minute what you have stopped seeing after a week.

Then adjust it for each application. The base document stays the same, but the subjects you name and the order of your sections should shift depending on whether you are writing to a chamber or a corporate firm.

An internship application email should be about 120 words, state your year and your exact dates in the first two sentences, and attach a one page CV. The firm is deciding in roughly fifteen seconds whether to open the attachment, and a long email makes that decision easier for them and worse for you.

The subject line

Make it searchable and specific. The reader may be sorting dozens of these into a folder.

• Internship application: June 2027, third year student, National Law University Jodhpur
• Application for internship, 2 to 27 June 2027

Some organisations prescribe the subject line. Human Rights Law Network, for example, has asked applicants to write “Internship at SLIC” followed by the month. Where a format is given, use it exactly, because an automatic filter may be sorting on it.

A sample you can adapt

This is a working template for an unsolicited application to an advocate or a small firm. Change every sentence that does not apply to you.

Subject: Internship application: 2 to 27 June 2027, third year student

Dear Mr Srivastava,

I am a third year student of the five year BA LLB programme at the University of Lucknow, and I am writing to ask whether you would consider taking an intern between 2 and 27 June 2027.

I am interested in service and constitutional matters, which is why I am writing to you in particular. I read your reported argument in the recent writ on compassionate appointment and would like to see how such matters are prepared. I have drafted a writ petition and a counter affidavit in our clinical course, and I can read and write Hindi fluently, which I understand is useful for records in the Lucknow Bench.

My CV is attached. I am available for the full four weeks and can report at the chamber from the first day. I would be glad to send a writing sample if that would help.

Thank you for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Anjali Verma

Third year, BA LLB (Hons), University of Lucknow

+91 98765 43210

Why each part is there

The first sentence does the work

Year, programme, university, and the exact dates. The reader now knows whether you are relevant and whether you fit a slot. Everything else in the email is secondary to this.

One sentence of genuine reason

This is the only part the reader cannot predict. Something you have actually read of theirs, a practice area you actually want, a matter type you actually find interesting. One sentence is enough and two is plenty.

Write this honestly. “I have long admired your firm’s excellence” is read as filler because it is filler. “I want to see how service matters are prepared before the Lucknow Bench” is specific and plainly true.

One sentence of what you bring

For a student with no internships yet, this is drafting done in a clinical course, a moot, a language, research you have done, or a published piece. It should be a fact, not an adjective. “I can read Hindi records” is worth more than “I am a hard working and dedicated student”.

Logistics, briefly

Availability, whether you can attend in person, and where you will be staying if that is relevant. For a chamber internship in another city, saying you have accommodation arranged removes an objection before it arises.

What to attach

A one page CV as a PDF, named sensibly: Anjali_Verma_CV.pdf. Never a Word file that opens with tracked changes, and never a link to a drive folder that requires a permission request.

Attach a cover letter only if asked. For most unsolicited applications the email is the cover letter, and sending both means the email gets skipped.

Mistakes that cost replies

• Dear Sir or Madam when the name is on the website. Find the name.
• No dates. The reader cannot act on it.
• Four paragraphs about your passion for justice. Cut all of it.
• A different firm’s name left in. It happens constantly and it ends the application.
• Attachments over about two megabytes. Compress the PDF.
• Sent from a casual email address. Use your name, or your university address.

The follow up

If there is no reply after about a week, send one short message in the same thread so the original is visible underneath.

Dear Mr Srivastava,

I wrote last week about an internship between 2 and 27 June. I understand you may not have had a chance to consider it. I remain available for those dates and would be glad to hear from you if a place is open.

Thank you,

Anjali Verma

One follow up is expected. Two is acceptable. A third will not help you.

A chamber and a large firm need different emails

The template above is written for an advocate or a small chamber, where one person reads the email and decides. The sentence about why you are writing to them specifically is what does the work, and it only works because it is true of that one person.

A large firm is different. The email is likely to be read by a recruitment or human resources team against a slot list, so what matters is that your dates, year and university are instantly visible and that you have followed whatever the website says. If the firm publishes a form, use the form and do not send an email instead. If it publishes a dedicated internship address, write to that and not to a partner, because going around the stated process is read as not having checked.

Where a firm has a stated application window, there is no advantage in writing before it opens. Your email simply arrives too early to be sorted and is rarely kept.

When you have no connection to the firm at all

Most students writing their first applications have no introduction, no family in the profession and nothing obvious to say in the “why you” sentence. That is normal and it is workable.

Give a reason drawn from the work rather than the relationship. A reported matter the advocate appeared in, a practice area the firm is known for, the court they practise before, a subject you have studied and want to see in operation. Any of these is a real reason, and all of them are available to anyone willing to spend ten minutes looking.

What does not work is flattery that could be addressed to anyone. If your sentence would be equally true of forty other firms, it is not doing anything, and the reader will know why it is there.

If the answer is yes

Reply the same day confirming the dates, ask what time to report on the first day and whether anything should be read beforehand. Then turn up on the first day with a notebook and a pen. A surprising number of interns do not.

Most law firm internships in India are arranged by email, several months before you want to intern, and not through any central application system. You find the firm, you find the right email address, and you send a short message with your CV attached. That is the whole mechanism, and the reason most applications fail is not the CV but the timing and the address.

Start earlier than feels sensible

Large firms fill their slots long in advance. Published guidance on AZB and Partners, for instance, suggests applying six to seven months before the period you want. Research organisations run shorter cycles: Project 39A at NLU Delhi has asked for applications eight to twelve weeks ahead, and the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy has suggested two to six months. Smaller chambers and single advocates often decide a few weeks out, sometimes a few days.

The practical rule is to apply for a summer internship in January or February, and for a winter internship around September. If you are reading this a fortnight before your vacation, apply anyway, but concentrate on individual advocates and small firms rather than the large ones.

Where internships are actually advertised

A minority are advertised at all. The ones that are tend to appear on Lawctopus, Internshala, LiveLaw, LawLex, HelloIntern and LawMantra, and on the careers pages of the larger firms. Some organisations use a form rather than email: PRS Legislative Research, the Centre for Public Policy Research, Project 39A and Vidhi have all used online forms, and those forms sometimes have their own quirks, such as PRS requiring the whole application in one sitting.

The majority of internships, particularly in litigation, are never advertised. You get them by writing to the advocate directly, or by being introduced. This is why the email itself matters so much, and why a list of fifty firms you have never heard of is less useful than ten you have researched.

Build a sensible list

Work out what you actually want from the internship before you apply. A student who wants to see courtrooms should be writing to advocates in the district court and the High Court, not to corporate firms. A student who wants transactional work should be writing to firms with a corporate practice.

For each target, find out three things: the correct email address for internship applications, whether they have a stated period or process, and the name of a partner or advocate if you can get it. The firm’s website, LinkedIn and recent reported judgments are all reasonable sources. If a firm publishes an internship email such as careers or internships at their domain, use it, because applications sent to a general enquiries address usually disappear.

What to send

A single email with a short body and two attachments: your CV, and a cover letter if the firm asks for one. Keep the CV to one page while you are a student. Name the files properly, because a file called cv_final2.pdf tells the reader something about you.

Some organisations want more. PRS has asked for a statement of purpose of up to 500 words, a PDF resume and a policy writing sample. Project 39A has asked for a CV, a cover letter naming your programme, year, university and exact dates, and a statement of purpose. Human Rights Law Network has asked for a form, a recommendation letter, a writing sample and a CV. Read the instruction and follow it exactly, since the first filter is usually whether you did.

Always state your exact dates. “I am available from 2 June to 27 June” is useful. “I am available during the summer” makes you someone else’s problem to sort out.

Apply during your vacation, not during term

In 2014 the Bar Council of India told universities and colleges to send students on internships only during vacations, not during the academic session. That circular was challenged and upheld: the Madhya Pradesh High Court dismissed the petition in Abhishek Sharma v. Bar Council of India, reported as 2022 LiveLaw (MP) 263, with the bench reasoning that the restriction protects students from having to give up teaching weeks.

So build your plan around your college calendar. An internship your university will not count is an expensive way to spend a month.

Following up

Firms do not usually reply to say no. A single polite follow up after about a week is normal and is widely advised. A second follow up a week after that is the limit. Beyond that you are not being persistent, you are being remembered for the wrong reason.

Keep a simple spreadsheet: firm, address written to, date sent, date followed up, outcome. You will apply to more places than you expect, and by April you will not remember who you have written to.

What usually goes wrong

• Applying too late. The commonest single reason, and the easiest to fix.
• One email sent to forty firms in the Bcc field. It is obvious, and it is ignored.
• No dates. The reader cannot match you to a slot.
• A CV that opens with a career objective. It says nothing and costs you the top of the page.
• Writing to the wrong address. A general contact form is where applications go to die.

If nothing comes back

Widen the list rather than rewriting the email for the tenth time. District court advocates, legal aid clinics, NGOs with legal departments, in house teams at local companies and university legal cells all take interns and are all far less contested than a tier one firm. The work is often better for a first or second year student, because you are given real tasks instead of being one of thirty interns in a room.

Online programmes are another route while you wait, though you should check whether your university counts them. Lexfolio runs a free virtual internship where students research and write legal content that is published under their own name, which at least gives you something to put on the CV and a writing sample to send with the next application.