Internships for Second Year Law Students

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.