Internships for First Year Law Students

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.