Internships for Third Year Law Students

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.