Today we will provide information and reviews about If you need to hire an unpaid intern, here’s a contract for that
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For many law students, the summer of 2021 has been challenging. With the pandemic still waning in the fall of 2020, many companies have scaled back or canceled summer programs entirely to avoid another unpleasant summer of remote work. Meanwhile, because employment offices were virtually unable to stock up when law schools reopened, many students missed a narrow window to apply for jobs and were left in limbo.
As a result, the summer of 2021 has turned into a summer of scrambles with law students scrambling to find every job they can. Services like Giglaw and Law Student Connect are championing all of this (more than law schools and many bar associations) by providing platforms that match law students with paying gigs. But positions are often short-term and don’t always provide enough experience to build a resume.
Which leaves law students hungry for experience with one option: unpaid internships.
Now, many prestigious resume-building jobs in law—such as attorney general’s or attorney general’s offices, judicial clerkships, and nonprofits—have always, rightly or wrongly, been unpaid. But unpaid internships are less common for private businesses, where both large firms and some in-house businesses compensate summer associates well. However, many small firms cannot compete, and some operate so close to the edge that they can only be hired if there is no price tag.
However, many sole proprietorships and small businesses are reluctant to offer unpaid internships for fear of illegality. But like most things lawyers assume Can not Do this because of the staunch objections on listservs (I remember when people argued that blogs were unethical), unpaid internships are allowed if you follow the rules. Here, the Department of Labor (DOL) has developed a flexible seven-part test called the Primary Beneficiary Rule that determines whether an intern is the primary beneficiary of the unpaid position. If so, the noncompensation is interesting. But if the employer is the primary beneficiary, he must compensate the intern with the minimum wage.
So how does this all add up for attorneys looking to hire unpaid interns? It’s really just a matter of common sense. An internship that involves a summer intern scanning documents and bringing lunches to lawyers probably doesn’t qualify as unpaid (although law students can get a lot out of helping digitize and automate an internship and dealing with angry lawyers whose lunches 10 minutes late, learn. In contrast, a summer internship consisting of legal research, assisting with client interviews and discovery responses, court watching, writing blog posts, accompanying staff to a CLE, and receiving feedback on written work that can be used as future writing samples, DOL fulfills test. And an unpaid internship doesn’t have to stay that way. Maybe you could get a law student to work on a guide or program that would generate income and pay you a bonus at the end of the summer.
If you decide to hire an unpaid intern, how can you prove that you followed the DOL rule? Guess what – there’s a contract for that – and it’s one of the 30+ template contracts you’ll find in our Legal ClauseIt. But to celebrate the start of summer, you can download an editable version of our unpaid summer intern contract for free. And if you found this helpful, you can still purchase Legal ClauseIt: Plug and Play Power Pacts for Modern Law Firms for just $127 this week.
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If law firms have the facilities, they should pay summer employees. Any legal employer, non-profit organizations and government should also be included. But if you want to help a law student (or an older lawyer returning to the workforce) gain valuable experience and the only way to change that is through an unpaid internship, it’s better than nothing.
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