Internship Terms & Certificate Policy

Interning somewhere should not involve guessing. This page is the whole arrangement in one place: who we can take, what we ask you for, what the work is, what the certificate at the end says, and what happens if something goes wrong. Read it before you apply, not after.

It sits alongside the internships page, which describes the work itself and how to apply. Where the two differ, this page governs.

1. Who this applies to

These terms apply to every student who applies for or does an internship with Legal Space Services. They do not apply to paid staff, who have their own engagement, or to advocates listed in our directory, who have their own terms. If you applied for a job rather than an internship, the notice that covers your application is the applicant privacy notice.

One thing to fix in your mind before anything else, because everything here follows from it: Legal Space Services is not a law firm. We do not practise law, we do not appear in court, and we do not give legal advice. We are a legal documentation and filing company. An internship here is real work on real files, but it is not an apprenticeship with an advocate and we will never describe it as one.

2. Who we can take

• You must be 18 or above. The application form checks your date of birth and will not accept you below that. This is a firm line, not a preference — see section 3.
• You must be enrolled in a law programme at a recognised university or college, in either the three-year or the five-year stream.
• You must have a no-objection certificate from your college for the dates you are applying for.
• We take students from anywhere in India. Some work can be done remotely; registry, filing and observation work cannot.

On length, we follow the rule rather than our own convenience:

So we run internships of one to four weeks and will not extend a single stretch beyond four weeks in an academic year, however much either of us might want to.

Two further things about that rule, which we would rather tell you now than let you find out in your final year. First, the rule lists the places a student may intern — the list includes NGOs, the judiciary, law firms and companies, which is what we are — but whether any particular internship counts is decided by your university, not by us and not by you. Get your coordinator's approval in writing before you start. Second, the same rule requires every student to intern at least once during the course with trial and appellate advocates. We cannot stand in for that, and we will not claim to. Plan it separately.

3. What we ask you for, and why

We ask for four things beyond the obvious contact details, and each one has a single reason.

We do not ask for an Aadhaar, a PAN, a bank account, a caste certificate, a photograph of your marksheet, or any payment detail. Nothing in an internship needs them. If a person claiming to be from Legal Space Services asks you for any of these, or for money, it is not us — see the fraud page and check their code on the verify a representative page.

4. What you will and will not do

The second line of this list is the one that matters most, and it is not negotiable.

None of this is about trusting you less. Appearing, advising and settling pleadings are things only an enrolled advocate may do, and a student who does them — or is allowed to — causes a problem that lands on the student as much as on us.

5. Supervision and the diary

You will have a named supervisor from the day you start. Every piece of work is checked before it goes anywhere, and nothing you produce leaves the office in your name.

You keep an internship diary. You fill it in your own panel as you go, you print it at the end, and we sign it. The reason is Rule 25 again — the diary is to be evaluated by your guide and your faculty, and a diary written from memory in the last hour of the last day is obvious to everybody who reads it. It also happens to be the most useful thing you will take away, so write it properly.

We will tell you honestly what was good and what was not. If you would rather not hear that, this is not the right internship.

6. No stipend, no fee, no job

Three plain statements, so there is no room for a misunderstanding later:

• We do not pay a stipend. The internship is unpaid. We say so on the internships page, on the application form, and here.
• We charge you nothing. Not to apply, not to intern, not for the certificate, not for the diary signature, not for a reference. There is no fee of any kind at any stage, and there never will be. Anybody who asks you for money in our name is committing a fraud — under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 that is cheating under section 318, and doing it while pretending to be us is cheating by personation under section 319.
• No job is promised. An internship is not a selection process and finishing one creates no claim to be hired. If a role is open and you are right for it, you are welcome to apply like anybody else through our careers page.

7. Whether an intern is an employee

Our position is that an internship here is a learning arrangement and creates no employer–employee relationship. That is also what you confirm when you apply.

We are not going to dress that up as settled law, because it is not. Indian labour law has no statutory definition of “intern” at all — the categories it knows are “apprentice” under the Apprentices Act, 1961 and “employee” or “worker”. The Code on Wages, 2019 defines an employee as a person “employed on wages”, and an unpaid intern is not that. The Employees' Provident Fund Organisation has taken the view in circulars that there is no employer–employee relationship between a student trainee and the industry, subject to conditions — chiefly that the course is recognised, that the training is part of the curriculum, and that it does not run beyond the period the curriculum specifies.

What courts actually look at is substance rather than the label on the arrangement. That is precisely why we keep internships short, tie them to your course through the NOC, keep them learning-led, and do not give an intern the standing workload of a paid staff member. If an internship here ever started to look like a job, the honest answer would be to make it one.

8. Confidentiality

Everything you see about a client is confidential — their name, their matter, their documents, what they said on a call, and the fact that they came to us at all. That holds during the internship and after it ends, without a time limit.

In practical terms: do not photograph a file, do not forward a document to your own email, do not put a matter in a WhatsApp group, do not use a real client's facts in a college assignment, and do not post about your day in a way that lets somebody be identified. If you want to write about the internship afterwards, you are welcome to — write about the work, not about the people.

If something was shared with you by mistake, tell your supervisor rather than reading on.

9. Conduct, safety and harassment

You are entitled to a workplace where you are safe and treated decently, and that is not a courtesy we are extending to you — the law says so, and it says so about interns specifically. The point is worth setting out because a great many students believe that being unpaid puts them outside it. It does not.

Two phrases do the work there: “whether for remuneration or not” and the express inclusion of “trainee”. An unpaid intern is covered.

Where to take a complaint. Section 6 of the same Act requires every District Officer to constitute a Local Committee to receive complaints from establishments where an Internal Committee has not been constituted because there are fewer than ten workers, or where the complaint is against the employer himself. That second limb matters for a small company and it does not depend on us: it is a route you have regardless of what we do. You may also bring it to our Grievance Officer, who is named at the bottom of this page, and you may go to the police. Nothing here requires you to come to us first.

For anything short of that — work you were not comfortable with, a supervisor who was unfair, a promise we did not keep — say it to the Grievance Officer. We acknowledge within 24 hours and resolve within 15 days, and raising something will never affect your certificate.

10. The certificate — what it says

Start with something we would rather you heard from us. There is no Bar Council rule about internship certificates. Rule 25 requires a diary and an evaluation; it prescribes no certificate, no format, no numbering and no registry, and no authority verifies one. Colleges ask for certificates as their own practice. Anybody who tells you their certificate is “Bar Council approved” is telling you something that does not exist.

So the question is not what a rule requires. It is whether the certificate tells the truth. Ours states:

• your name, college and course;
• the exact dates and the number of weeks you completed;
• the kinds of work you actually did, drawn from your diary;
• that Legal Space Services is not a law firm and does not practise law;
• that you did not appear before any court and did not advise any client;
• a certificate number, and the application number it belongs to.

And it will never say that you practised law, appeared in any matter, drafted pleadings independently, trained under an advocate, or completed anything “recognised” by the Bar Council. We will not write those lines even if you ask, and we would say the same to a student who brought us a draft from somewhere else. A certificate that overstates what happened is worth less than none: the first person to test it will be an interviewer, and you will be the one standing there.

Verification. Your internship coordinator can write to our Grievance Officer with the certificate number and we will confirm the dates, the weeks and the work in writing. We do not charge for it and there is no time limit. We keep the internship record for three years exactly so that this is possible.

Timing and cost. The certificate is issued after the last day, once the diary is complete. It is free, like everything else here.

11. When a certificate is withheld

There are three situations, and these are the only three:

1. You did not complete the weeks you started. We will still certify the weeks you did complete, if the diary covers them.
2. The diary was not kept, so there is nothing to certify. We will tell you this well before the last day, not on it.
3. Something in the application was untrue — a college you are not enrolled at, an NOC that was not issued, an age that was not yours.

If we withhold a certificate we tell you why in writing, and you can take that to the Grievance Officer, who is independent of the person who supervised you. We will not withhold a certificate because you raised a complaint, because you gave us feedback we did not enjoy, because you left on time, or to pressure you into staying longer. If a certificate is withdrawn after being issued — which has not happened and which we expect never to — it would be for reason three alone, in writing, with the reason stated.

12. Ending the internship

You may stop at any time and you do not owe us a reason. Tell your supervisor. There is no notice period, no penalty and nothing to pay.

We may end an internship early for a serious breach of section 4 or section 8 — appearing or advising, or a breach of client confidentiality — or if the application turns out to be untrue. We would tell you the reason, and you could take it to the Grievance Officer.

13. Your personal data

Our full Privacy Policy applies, and is also available in Hindi. What is specific to interns:

Inside Legal Space Services, your application is seen by the person who assesses it and by your supervisor. It is not shared outside the company. We do not publish interns' names anywhere on this website — the only number we publish is how many interns there have been, with no names attached to it.

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to erase it. Write to the Grievance Officer below. The one thing we may keep after an erasure request is the minimum needed to answer a verification request about a certificate already issued, because withdrawing that would make your own certificate unverifiable.

14. Version and acceptance

When you tick the three declarations on the application form, we record which version of these terms was in force, along with the date and time. The current version is INT-TERMS-2026-10-1.0, in force from 3 October 2026.

That record exists for your protection more than ours. If we change these terms later, your application still points at the text you actually read, and the change history at the bottom of this page shows what moved and when. We will not apply a changed term to an internship that was already agreed.

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