Law Student CV With No Experience: What to Put In

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.