29 June 2024 | Online session | Hosted by Lawducation
Vircon Legal’s Managing Partner E. Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu joined a focused online session organized by Lawducation, a legal education platform, to walk through how a law-firm internship should actually be designed — for the firm that runs it and for the candidate who lives it. The audience: aspiring partner-track lawyers and recent law graduates mapping out their next steps.
What we covered
The conversation moved past the “fetch coffee, photocopy contracts” caricature and into the substance: an internship is a serious investment by both sides, and design choices decide whether the firm builds future talent or burns through interns who never come back. The takeaways were practical, not aspirational.
Program structure
What a real internship program looks like — start dates, length, expectations, deliverables, and the calendar of touchpoints between the intern, the practice group lead, and HR. Why an unstructured “we’ll see what comes up” approach almost always fails on both sides.
Rotation
Why rotation across practice groups (corporate, M&A, dispute resolution, regulatory, employment) matters more than depth in one area at the internship stage — and how the firm should sequence rotations so the intern leaves with a real map of where they fit. The practical mechanics: how long each rotation runs, who owns the handover, what gets evaluated at the end of each.
Mentorship
Why mentorship is not the same as supervision. The senior who teaches you to draft is not always the senior who teaches you how to think about your career — and a good program separates those roles. How Vircon Legal pairs interns with both: a deal mentor (technical) and a career mentor (path).
We also discussed how interns should read a firm before they sign — what to ask in interviews, which signals matter, and why the “where do partners come from?” question tells you more than the partner track brochure.
For founders and operators thinking about hiring junior lawyers in-house, similar principles apply. To talk through a specific situation, reach out here.
