The summer after 1L is your first shot at real legal work, and there is more than one way into a 1L summer internship: judicial internships with state and federal judges, summer law clerk jobs at small firms, public interest and government placements, and 1L summer associate seats at large firms.
Here is what each option involves, when applications happen, and how to land one.
What jobs can 1Ls get?
What these jobs share is the shape of the work: research, writing, and time inside the settings you are aiming at, done alongside the lawyers and judges doing it.
What differs is the setting.
Each option below teaches a different thing, introduces you to a different group of people, and feeds a different path after 2L.
The options this guide covers:
- Judicial internships — a summer in a judge's chambers, at the state or federal level, trial or appellate. Covered in its own section below.
- Small-firm summer clerk positions — clerk work inside a small firm, posted under titles like summer law clerk or simply law clerk.
- Public interest and government placements — legal aid organizations, prosecutors' and public defender offices, and government agencies are the places to look here. Hiring and funding arrangements vary by organization, so read what the posting says.
- Large-firm 1L programs — the 1L summer associate seat at large firms, the first rung of the two-summer recruiting track described below.
The titles overlap in confusing ways.
Summer associate, summer law clerk, judicial intern and plain intern all describe student summer work, and employers use them differently — a small firm's summer clerk, a chambers intern and a large firm's 1L summer associate are three different summers.
Read the employer type in the posting, not the title: the employer tells you what the summer actually is.
When do you apply?
Start with the structure of it: NALP's Principles for a Fair and Ethical Recruitment Process — the profession's suggested best practices for recruiting, not binding rules — leave recruiting timing and how long offers stay open to each employer, asking employers to publish their own guidelines rather than setting fixed deadlines.
That is why no single calendar governs 1L summer hiring: courts, agencies, nonprofits and firms each post their own application windows, and the posted deadline in front of you is the real deadline.
Confirm each one with the court, organization or firm that posted it.
One rule of the road touches 1Ls directly: NALP asks employers for particular sensitivity during the first semester of law school and for respect of each school's 1L recruiting guidelines.
What that means in practice is decided school by school, so your career services office is the authority on which employers may contact first-years, in what formats, and when.
Check its 1L recruiting rules before planning any fall applications.
The pressure question is live enough that NALP addressed it publicly: in an April 8, 2026 statement, the organization said some recruiting practices may put undue pressure on students and urged employers to re-examine their approaches against the Principles.
The Principles also ask employers to set reasonable response deadlines, give candidates a reasonable period to consider an offer — with no fixed day count attached — and to consider reasonable extension requests and avoid undue pressure.
If two offers collide, an extension request is a normal request to make, and your career services office can help you make it.
Practical sequencing: build the resume, references and writing sample over winter break, watch postings as courts, agencies and firms publish them, and treat each court's and organization's deadline as its own project rather than assuming the dates move together.
It also helps to look one year downstream, because the recruiting clock keeps moving earlier.
In the 2025 recruiting cycle that filled 2026 2L summer programs, 80% of offers came from employer-sponsored recruiting — firms' direct applications — and 20% from law-school-sponsored methods such as OCI; 85% of those 2L summer offers were made before July; and some law schools moved traditional OCI to spring or early summer as early interview programs spread.
That process belongs to 2L recruiting, and the guide to how OCI works covers it in full.
The 1L takeaway is its direction of travel: the students who recruit well as 2Ls built their materials, grades and references early.
Judicial internships
A judicial internship places you in a judge's chambers for the summer — at a state trial court, a state appellate court, or a federal court.
The work is chambers work: judicial interns research legal questions, produce written work for the judge's review, and observe proceedings when the calendar allows.
It is the closest a student gets to watching decisions get made, and the writing habit it builds — tight research memos on a deadline — carries into any of the other options on this page.
How to find one: start with the court's own website, and make your career services office the second stop — ask which courts have taken interns from your program before.
Application windows, duration and pay all belong to each court's own program, so read the posting itself and confirm deadlines with the court rather than relying on what held true for a classmate's internship last year.
A naming note before you search: the post-graduation version of chambers work — the judicial clerkship — is a different job from the student internship, and the title law clerk covers both chambers roles and firm-side roles.
The law clerk career guide separates the versions, including how a firm summer clerk differs from both.
Small-firm summer clerk positions
A small-firm summer clerkship puts you inside firm work with fewer layers between you and the lawyers doing it.
The clerk there does the firm's support work — legal research, drafting, filings, and whatever the practice needs that week — under a lawyer's supervision.
Without a formal program's training calendar, what you take from the summer depends heavily on the lawyers supervising you, which cuts both ways: more responsibility is possible, and so is more variation in what you are asked to do.
Hunt in more than one place.
Check job boards, individual firm websites and your school's postings, and consider writing directly to firms whose practice interests you — a short note, your resume and your transcript.
Ask your career services office and your local bar association what listings cross their desks, too.
Posted openings also show up on general legal job boards: browse law firm jobs on LawFirmHires to see which firms are hiring right now.
One more angle on the same title: summer clerk work is the student-sized version of the broader clerk family — firm clerk roles and chambers clerkships — which is why it is worth understanding the whole family before you choose which one to chase.
BigLaw 1L programs
Big-firm summer recruiting runs on a two-summer clock: a 1L summer, then a 2L summer program — the summer associate class — that ends in an offer decision.
Firms that hire 1L summers set their own eligibility criteria and deadlines for them, so treat each firm's recruiting page as the source of truth and confirm terms with the firm before you plan around a program.
The reason a 1L seat is worth chasing is what it converts to.
In the 2025 recruiting cycle — the cycle feeding 2026 2L summer programs — NALP found 1L summer associates received offers to return for the 2L summer at a record 94.2% rate.
A 1L summer at a firm is, in effect, an early claim on the 2L class; the 2L program is where the full-time offer decision happens, and our guide to summer associate programs covers how that program works and how to convert the offer.
Finding the 1L seats is manual work: check large firms' own recruiting pages, and ask your career services office which firms recruit at your school.
The 1L recruiting guidelines covered in the timing section above apply here in full — including the first-semester sensitivity NALP asks of employers — so confirm with your school what first-year contact each firm is allowed before you build a plan around it.
Paid vs unpaid
Pay is set employer by employer, and it is the first thing to settle before you accept anything.
The cleanest published benchmark sits one summer up: NALP's Associate Salary Survey put the median weekly salary for second-year summer associates — law students in their 2L summer — at $3,850 across all firms in 2025, and $4,100 at firms of more than 700 lawyers.
That is the 2L figure, not a 1L one; whatever a 1L role pays is stated in that role's posting, so read it before you commit.
Pay and funding for public interest and government summers vary by program, so read what the posting says.
Ask your career services office what funding, if any, your school offers for 1L summers.
Unpaid work at a for-profit employer is the case where federal rules come in: the Department of Labor's Fact Sheet #71 says courts use a seven-factor "primary beneficiary test" to decide whether an intern at a for-profit employer is an employee owed minimum wage and overtime, and no single factor is decisive.
If you are weighing an unpaid role at a firm, read the Department of Labor's internship guidance and confirm how the arrangement is structured before you accept.
Career information, not legal advice. Pay and internship rules change — confirm current arrangements with each employer or court, and with the Department of Labor for questions about unpaid internships.
Confirm pay before you accept