What law firm recruiters actually look for in a student’s CV and internship profile goes far beyond grades. Here’s what separates candidates who get called back.
There is a peculiar silence in every law firm’s recruitment process. Partners and HR leads will tell you they want “well-rounded candidates” and “strong communicators.” They will mention grades in passing, gesturing vaguely at a 60% threshold or a CGPA of 7.5. What they rarely say out loud is this: the moment your CV lands on a desk, a judgment is made in roughly eight seconds. And that judgment has very little to do with whether you can explain the rule in Rylands v Fletcher.
This is not cynicism. It is the reality of how legal hiring works when a mid-sized litigation firm in Delhi or a corporate law practice in Mumbai receives 400 applications for two internship spots.
The Grades Problem (and Why It’s Overrated)
Grades matter. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest. A consistently strong academic record signals discipline, analytical rigor, and the ability to perform under pressure. Recruiters from NLU-circuit firms, in particular, do filter by CGPA at the first pass.
But here is what every experienced hiring partner knows and almost no one tells students: grades are a floor, not a ceiling. Once you clear the threshold, they stop differentiating you. The candidate with a 7.9 CGPA and three substantive internships at chambers that actually do contested work will almost always be preferred over the candidate with an 8.6 who spent summers collecting certificates from webinars.
The CV is where this distinction becomes visible. And most students, bluntly, have no idea how to make it work in their favour.
What “Internship Experience” Actually Means to a Recruiter
When a recruiter scans the internship section of a law student’s resume, they are not counting entries. They are reading for quality, progression, and whether the candidate can do real work.
An internship at a Senior Advocate’s chamber where you drafted pleadings, attended court, and were trusted with research that went into actual filings is worth ten “internship certificates” from research organisations where you summarised judgments into a shared Google Doc. Recruiters know the difference. They have done both.
The critical mistake students make is listing internship durations without any description of what they actually did. “Interned at XYZ Law Firm, June 2023” tells a recruiter nothing. “Drafted rejoinders and written statements in civil suits pending before the Delhi High Court; assisted in preparing arguments for interim injunction hearings” tells them you are functional, professional, and worth a conversation.
Specificity is the entire game. The student who can describe their work precisely signals that they were present, engaged, and learning. The one who cannot suggests they were there in body only.
The Skills Section Is Not What You Think
Most law student CVs contain a skills section that reads something like: “Legal Research, Drafting, Case Analysis, MS Word, MS Excel, TeamWork, Communication.” This is, to be direct, useless filler. Every applicant has this section. It conveys nothing because it costs nothing to write.
What a recruiter is actually looking for, buried in the experience section if it’s done well, is evidence of specific technical and legal skills applied in context. Can you read a balance sheet? Do you understand the NCLT process well enough to assist on an IBC matter? Have you used SCC Online or Manupatra for something more sophisticated than a basic keyword search? Do you draft in plain, precise legal English, or do you produce the dense, passive-voice prose that junior lawyers are famous for?
These questions get answered not in a skills section but in how you describe what you have done.
The Formatting Issue Nobody Mentions
A CV that is difficult to read communicates one thing above all others: poor judgment. Law is a profession built on clear, ordered communication. A document cluttered with six font sizes, inconsistent spacing, inexplicable bold text, and a photograph that takes up a quarter of the page suggests that the candidate either lacks an eye for detail or does not understand professional standards. Neither is a good signal for a profession where a misplaced comma in a contract can have consequences.
One page is almost always sufficient for a student with under three years of experience. Clean formatting, consistent hierarchy, and generous white space are not luxuries. They are basic professional competence.
The Hidden Variable: Intellectual Curiosity
Here is something that experienced litigators and partners notice immediately in interviews but also pick up, faintly, from a CV: has this person engaged with law beyond coursework and internships?
Have they mooted? Published a note or article? Participated in a legal aid clinic? Written something, anywhere, that reflects they find the law interesting outside the context of marks and placements? This is not about extracurricular padding. It is about signal. A candidate who mooted seriously and lost in the quarterfinals has demonstrated more about how they handle pressure, prepare arguments, and respond to scrutiny than a candidate with a clean transcript and nothing else.
The best CVs tell a coherent story. There is a logic to the choices: the areas pursued, the experiences accumulated, the direction suggested. A student who has clearly been interested in arbitration since second year, interned accordingly, and written something on the topic is a fundamentally different proposition from someone who has done everything and therefore stands for nothing in particular.
What This Means When You Sit Down to Write Your CV
The document is not a record of what you have done. It is an argument for why you should be given a chance. Treat it like one. Cut what does not serve that argument. Sharpen what does. Be specific, be honest, and be precise.
And if your internship and resume profile is thin right now, the answer is not to inflate what you have. The answer is to make the next six months count in a way that gives you something real to write about.
Recruiters are not looking for the perfect candidate. They are looking for the candidate who knows what they are doing and why. That is a much more achievable standard. Most students simply never aim for it.
