Your First Week of a Law Internship: What to Do

Nobody expects you to know any law in your first week. They expect you to turn up on time, take an instruction accurately, ask when you are stuck, and keep what you see to yourself. Interns are judged almost entirely on reliability in the first week, and almost not at all on brilliance.

The first morning

Reach early. Courts and chambers run on a schedule you do not control, and an advocate leaving for a 10.30 listing will not wait for you. Carry a notebook and a pen, because typing while someone speaks reads as inattention in most Indian chambers, and your phone will be in your pocket in court anyway.

Ask three questions on day one and then stop asking administrative things: what time should I reach, whom do I report to when you are in court, and is there a dress code beyond the obvious. Dark formals and covered shoes are safe everywhere.

Taking an instruction

This is the skill that separates interns who get called back from interns who do not. When you are given work, get four things before you leave the room:

1. What exactly is wanted. A note? A list of cases? A draft? A one line answer?
2. By when. “End of day” means different things to different people. Ask for a time.
3. How long it should be. One page or ten changes the entire approach.
4. Where to look. Is there a file, a previous matter, a judgment to start from?

Then repeat it back in one sentence before you go. “So, a two page note on whether a Section 34 petition filed after the ninety day period can be condoned, with the leading authorities, by five this evening.” Thirty seconds of confirmation saves a day of work on the wrong question, and the wrong question is the commonest reason intern work is discarded.

When you are stuck

Work at it for an hour. If you are still stuck, ask, and ask properly: say what you were asked, what you have found, where you have looked, and what the specific obstacle is. “I could not find anything” is not a report. “I searched for High Court authority on this point in the last five years and found only two cases, both distinguishable because they concern government contracts, so I wanted to check whether I should widen it” is a report.

Interns who disappear for two days and produce nothing are remembered badly. Interns who ask a sensible question on the second afternoon are not.

Confidentiality, and the social media rules

Everything you see in a chamber or a firm is confidential. Client names, the facts of a matter, what was said in a conference, what is in a draft, what strategy was discussed. This is not a formality. It is the thing that will end an internship fastest.

The Bar Council of India issued a circular on 17 July 2026 regulating social media use by advocates, law students and interns, and it is stricter than most students realise. As reported by LiveLaw, the circular requires each student to sign a separate undertaking before every internship, which becomes part of their institutional record, and law schools are to maintain a register of those undertakings.

Under the circular, interns are not to record, photograph or publish material about court proceedings, client conferences, case files, pleadings, briefs, chambers or court visits. It specifically targets “day in a chamber”, “internship reveal”, “courtroom drama” and “lawyer life” style reels, and it prohibits using the internship, court corridors, chambers, robes, or the identity of the supervising advocate, judge or firm for social media or personal branding. Posting photographs in robes or inside court buildings in a way that breaches professional decorum is covered too, as are AI generated images or deepfakes of judges, advocates or proceedings.

The stated consequences include withdrawal of the internship, reporting to your law school or the State Bar Council, and other disciplinary action. So the short version is: do not post about your internship while you are doing it. A LinkedIn line at the end saying where you interned and what area of work you did is a different matter from a reel shot in a court corridor.

What the work will actually be

In a litigation chamber, expect case research, preparing chronologies, summarising judgments, proofreading drafts, tabbing and arranging briefs, and a great deal of sitting in court watching matters that are over in ninety seconds. In a firm, expect document review, research notes, updating trackers, and summarising contracts.

Some of this is dull. All of it is how the work gets done, and the intern who tabs a brief carefully is more useful than the one who wanted to argue the matter. Court observation is worth more than it feels like at the time: watch how an experienced advocate opens, how they handle a question from the bench, and what happens when they are unprepared.

Small things that are noticed

• Citing a case you have not read. Read the judgment, not the headnote, and never the summary alone.
• Submitting work without reading it once more. Typos in an intern’s note suggest the research was done the same way.
• Saying you have finished when you have not started the last part.
• Phone out during a conference or in court.
• Asking about a certificate in week one. It will come at the end if you earn it.
• Not knowing basic facts of the matter you have been working on for a week.

At the end

Ask for feedback once, near the end, in person, and take it without defending yourself. “Is there anything I should do differently in my next internship” is a better question than “how did I do”, because it invites something specific.

If you want to come back, say so plainly before you leave, and ask whether you may write again for a later period. Most people say yes to an intern who was reliable, and that one sentence is how second internships happen.

If you cannot get a chamber internship this cycle, written work still builds the sample you will need for the next application. Lexfolio runs a four week virtual internship where the work is researched and written for publication, which is one way to have something to show.