How Law Students Can Score a Good Internship

If you are a hard working law student but find it complex to score a good internship, which is further affecting your practical knowledge of law, you have come to the right stop. Here we will break down the processes involved in scoring a good internship into some really simple steps. 

Step 1: Which year of your 3 or 5yr course are you in?

What fields of subjects have been your interest in the past semesters?

Step 2: Decide what kind of work you want to learn:

Decide which broader area of law you want to learn first.

This is one of the toughest steps especially when you are in the first year of your course and don't have much knowledge about law. But if you don’t really have enough knowledge about law, does that mean that you cannot intern in your first year of a law degree. 

No! We at lawyers club india believe that law students should be encouraged from the first year itself to gain practical knowledge of law. All the top law schools have the same expectation from their students. They believe that while theoretical knowledge in law is crucial and you must learn all the acts and sections in each fields of law, it would not be of much use if a student is unable to understand the practical implementation of it. 

So now, the broader areas of law that we talked about in the beginning of the second step can include anything from a Legal Cell in an NGO, work under a general district attorney, work under a Criminal or a Divorce Lawyer, or you must have heard about some Law firms and Legal-aid centres.

*It is important to note in the 2nd Step that while it is crucial to start internships from first year, it is always recommended that law students intern at basic legal organisations in the first year. Since a law student would just be getting a gist of the major laws in our country in the first year and they won’t really learn a lot of legal processes to be used practically, interning with big legal organisation or with major lawyers from high court or supreme court can lower their own morale about their legal profession. This usually happens because the law student doesn’t have much knowledge about any common laws of India in the first year so they won’t be able to perfectly understand all the processes in an internship and it would thus be a mere waste of their time.

Step 3: Search where you want to intern specifically:

Find out the names of various organisations or lawyers or legal offices in your field of interests and do some research about each of them and the kind of legal work they do or the kind of legal skills they require from a law intern. 

Step 4: Put all chosen offices or organisations in order of preference:

Make a list of the names of all legal organisations or lawyers that you chose and then put them all in order of your preferences. It is not necessary that you are selected by each organisation that you apply to, so it is necessary that you find at least 5 legal organisations or lawyers in your chosen field of law.

Step 5: Search for the e-mail IDs or Application Procedure:

Once you are done making a list of your chosen organisations or lawyers in order of your preference, search for the e-mail IDs of the lawyers or their respected law offices or go to the websites of each legal organisation you chose. Major legal organisations often have their own specific ways of accepting applicants for internship on their website, so it is crucial that you visit each website for the respective office or organisation that you want to work with.

Step 6: Making a CV

If you are in your first year of LLB or Ba.LLB; or in the second year of your Ba.LLb course, no legal organisation or lawyer would expect a perfect and impressive CV from you. In the basic years of you degree, you won’t have much practical knowledge about law anyway so you should just mention your details nicely with the name of you School and College and the degree course that you are pursuing. Also mention some basic skills (not necessarily legal skills) that might be useful to any organisation.

If your are in your latter years of your course, you shall mention each of your previous internships and just a line or two about your experience there or how much knowledge or what skills you achieved from that internship. Also, when you are mentioning your skills that might be of use to the lawyers office or legal organisation, you should mention the various legal skills that you might have developed over the course of your previous internships. 

Step 7: Submitting applications!

The next step should be the submitting of applications in you chosen offices or organisations. It is important that law students note that sending applications to 20 legal offices at one time is not a good idea. Students often make that mistake and it usually backfires if they get offers from two or more organisations at the same time. If that happens and you select one out of the three places you got selected in, it is quite likely that it would be really hard for you to score an internship with the other two in latter years. It is not appreciated that you first apply to an organisation and when they select you, you refuse to work. If you want to gain practical knowledge in this field, you must learn some basic work ethics.

So, apply to just 2 or 3 organisations or offices in the first week and wait for their reply. If your application has been selected, you might be called for the next step which is either a written test or, an interview or, both. 

Most legal offices or, lawyers have the basic application process. You can just send your CV at their e-mail IDs with a brief paragraph about why you want to intern at that office or under such lawyer.

*Once you score a good internship, make sure that you make notes on everyday of your internship about your experience and about the work you did or learnt, because those notes might help you in future and also with your future applications.