Question From A Law Student: Have Legal Internships Become An Unregulated System Of Free Labour?

Is the legal internship in India a genuine training ground or has it quietly become an unregulated system of free labour dressed up as mentorship, with no accountability, no standards, and no consequence for the advocate who wastes a student's time?

Every semester, thousands of law students across India pack their bags, print their offer letters, and travel, sometimes across states to intern at chambers and firms that have made them exactly one promise: experience. No stipend. No structured learning. No written objectives. No feedback mechanism. Just the word of a senior advocate, a stamped certificate at the end, and the silent understanding that if you complain, you will not be called back and worse, you will be talked about.

I have interned. I have sat in a chamber at 9 AM and been handed a stack of photocopying at 9:05. I have drafted plaints that were filed under the advocate's name with no acknowledgment. I have fetched chai, organised case files, waited three hours outside a courtroom to carry a bag, and returned to college having learned in five weeks that the legal profession has normalised the exploitation of its own future.

The irony is not lost on me. This is a profession that litigates labour rights, drafts minimum wage petitions, and argues before courts that workers deserve dignity. And yet, the intern who is expected to work full days, produce usable legal work, maintain confidentiality, and represent the chamber professionally exists in a complete legal vacuum. There is no Bar Council regulation governing what an intern must be taught. There is no minimum standard for what constitutes a "learning experience." There is no grievance mechanism if an advocate behaves inappropriately, assigns work outside the intern's competence, or simply ignores them entirely for thirty days.

The certificate at the end says "satisfactorily completed." It does not say what was learned. It does not say whether a single brief was explained, a single court appearance observed meaningfully, or a single piece of feedback was given. It is a document that certifies presence, not growth. And yet this certificate is what law schools demand, what future employers scan, and what the entire system uses as proof that a student is "prepared."

What makes this particularly urgent is who it harms most. Students from non-NLU colleges, from tier-two and tier-three cities, from families without legal connections, these students cannot afford to do three unpaid internships in Delhi or Mumbai just to build a network. They arrive with no contacts, no reference, and no safety net. They take whatever internship accepts them. And if that internship is a waste of time, they have spent money they didn't have, on travel and accommodation, for a certificate that could have been printed at home.

Meanwhile, the intern from a well-connected family gets placed in a top chamber through a WhatsApp forward, gets personally mentored, gets their name on a research note and then we wonder why the legal profession reproduces the same elite networks generation after generation.

The question, then, is not whether internships are valuable, of course experiential learning matters. The question is whether the legal profession is willing to take any responsibility for what actually happens during those internships. Should the Bar Council of India prescribe minimum standards for legal internships: a learning log, a defined set of tasks, a mandatory feedback form? Should chambers that regularly take interns be required to register and comply with basic guidelines? Should there be any mechanism, even an anonymous one, through which a student can report an internship that was exploitative, inappropriate, or simply fraudulent?

The legal profession prides itself on being a noble calling. It is time it extended that nobility to the people standing at its door: the interns carrying the bags, making the copies, drafting the work, and waiting, quietly, for someone to finally teach them something.

This question is directed to the Bar Council of India, senior advocates, law firm partners, law school deans, and legal education experts whose decisions shape the future of legal training in India.

'Question From A Law Student' Vertical, steered by Himanshi Hans