A summer associate is a law student hired by a law firm for a summer of real legal work between school years.
You work on research, writing and drafting assignments under attorney supervision while the firm decides whether to offer you a full-time associate job after graduation.
BLS notes that a successful summer job or internship during law school may result in an employment offer after graduation.
What summer associates work on
The assignments are project-based: legal research and memoranda, drafting projects, and support on the matters the firm's practice groups are working.
Work arrives with real deadlines, and a supervising attorney reviews what you hand back.
That review is the point — the summer functions as a long audition conducted through your written work.
The classes you join are small: NALP put the average 2L summer class at eight summer associates per office in 2025, and at 29 per office in New York City.
On composition, NALP's 2025 data counted women at 55.26% of summer associates — down for the second year in a row.
Events and evaluation
Alongside the workload sits a social calendar: firm-hosted lunches, receptions and other events that put you across attorneys from different practice groups.
Treat them as part of the job rather than a break from it.
Attorneys remember the summer associate who asked sharp questions over lunch as clearly as the one who turned in a strong memo.
The evaluation that decides your offer runs through the work, though: how your writing held up, how you handled a tight deadline, whether you asked the right question before going down the wrong path.
Programs differ in how formally the feedback reaches you — check whether comments come back on each assignment, at a midsummer check-in, or at an end-of-summer review.
Ask early how your firm evaluates its summers, and ask for feedback directly.
Waiting until the summer ends to learn there was a problem with your first memo helps no one.
Getting an offer at the end
The summer ends with a decision.
Firms extend entry-level associate offers to the summers they want back, and NALP measured the offer rate from 2L summer programs at 97% in 2025 — unchanged from 2024 — with an acceptance rate of 89.4%.
First-year summers convert one step earlier: NALP recorded a record 94.2% of 1L summer associates receiving offers to return for the 2L summer.
The mechanism is the one BLS describes for summer jobs generally — successful completion of a summer job or internship may result in an offer of employment after graduation.
A 2L offer is that mechanism with a start date attached: a job waiting for you after graduation.
Summer associate vs summer law clerk at small firms
Same substance, different label.
"Summer associate" is the title formal big-firm summer programs use — the class, the events and the evaluation schedule are program features.
"Summer law clerk" (or just "summer clerk") is the title you will meet outside that track: at smaller firms, in government offices and in courts, the same kind of supervised research and writing happens without a formal class built around it.
Don't read too much into the label.
Postings for similar summer work read summer associate, summer law clerk or law clerk, and the substance — supervised legal research and writing for lawyers — is what counts on a resume.
What differs is structure: a summer associate joins a cohort and is evaluated against a firm-wide entry-level class, while a small-firm clerk might be the only summer hire, working directly for the lawyers who run the place.
Both are stepping stones; the law clerk title has a broader story across firms and courts.
How to get a summer associate job
Two channels produce 2L summer offers, and they are far from even: in the 2025 recruiting cycle for 2026 2L summer programs, 80% of offers came from employer-sponsored recruiting — the firms' own application processes — and 20% from law-school-sponsored methods such as on-campus interviewing (NALP).
The mechanics of the school-side route are the subject of our guide to on-campus interviewing.
Move early: NALP reports 85% of 2L summer offers in the 2025 cycle went out before July, and some law schools moved traditional OCI to spring or early summer in 2025 as early interview programs spread.
The practical takeaway: your school's actual dates are the ones that apply to you, and they may sit earlier than the fall-of-2L-year timing you might assume.
Check your school's dates, not the old calendar
Where to find law clerk jobs
Summer positions surface through the channels above and through job boards: firms post summer associate and summer clerk openings on their career pages, and legal job boards collect them.
Our law clerk jobs page gathers current openings at law firms in one place — useful for seeing which employers are hiring summer help and what the posted roles actually ask for.