What Is a Law School Externship?

All three put you in front of real legal work, but the supervision structure and the paperwork are different. In an externship, you are placed with an outside employer—the 'site'—and a lawyer or judge there supervises your day-to-day work. Your law school stays involved through a faculty member who runs a companion seminar, reads your journals or reflection papers, collects a written work sample, and evaluates whether you get credit.

In a clinic, the law school itself is the law office. Faculty are the supervising attorneys of record, the clients are the clinic's clients, and the school carries the malpractice coverage. You typically have more direct client contact and more responsibility for case strategy, but fewer placement options.

A summer or term-time internship is just a job (paid or unpaid). No credit, no seminar, no faculty evaluation. The same U.S. Attorney's office might host you as a summer intern in June and as an extern in September; the work looks similar, the academic wrapper is what changes.

Two accreditation standards matter. ABA Standard 303(a)(3) requires every J.D. student to complete at least six credit hours of experiential coursework—simulation courses, law clinics, or field placements. Standard 304 defines each category and sets the conditions a field placement must meet to count.

Under Standard 304, a qualifying field placement must give you substantial lawyering experience reasonably similar to what a practicing lawyer does; must be supervised by a site supervisor and by a faculty member; must include a classroom component, tutorial, or other contemporaneous opportunity for guided reflection; must involve evaluation of your performance; and must rest on a written understanding among you, the school, and the site that spells out educational objectives, the work expected, and the hours. Schools also have to do periodic site evaluation, and placements above a certain credit threshold trigger more intensive faculty oversight.

Standard 310 controls the math. A credit hour is roughly 50 minutes of classroom time plus two hours of out-of-class work per week for about fifteen weeks, or an equivalent amount of work for other academic activities. Applied to fieldwork, that yields a floor of about 42.5 hours of work per credit; most schools round up and require 45 to 55 hours per credit. Three externship credits therefore usually means 135 to 165 hours over the semester, or roughly 10 to 12 hours a week.

Availability is school-specific and geography-driven, but the categories are consistent nationally.

Whether for-profit law firms are eligible varies sharply by school. Some schools flatly exclude private firms on the theory that firm work is available as paid employment; others allow it only if the work is pro bono or the firm agrees not to bill your time. Check your registrar's externship policy before you fall in love with a placement.

Yes, as a matter of accreditation. The ABA removed its ban on compensated field placements effective in 2016, so the Standards no longer prohibit earning both pay and credit. But individual schools set their own rules, and a substantial number still bar pay-plus-credit or cap it.

Separately, wage-and-hour law limits who can pay you nothing. Government agencies and nonprofits can generally accept unpaid volunteers. Private for-profit employers face the Fair Labor Standards Act, and courts and the Department of Labor now apply a 'primary beneficiary' test—drawn from the Second Circuit's decision in Glatt v. Fox Searchlight Pictures—that asks whether the intern or the employer gains more from the arrangement. Academic credit, a tie to formal coursework, and an educational rather than productive-labor focus all push toward lawful unpaid status.

Financial aid is the other practical constraint. Externship credits are credits, so they count toward your enrollment status and tuition. A three-credit externship costs whatever three credits cost at your school. Some schools offer public interest stipends or summer funding that can be layered on top; ask the public interest office early, because those applications close in late winter.

Most schools open externships to 2Ls and 3Ls, and a few allow rising 2Ls to extern in the summer after 1L. The internal deadline usually falls a full semester ahead—March or early April for fall placements, October for spring—because the school needs the signed placement agreement before registration closes.

The application has two tracks running at once. You apply to the site the way you would apply to any job: resume, cover letter, writing sample, transcript, references. Federal judges and DOJ components often want materials months in advance and may require a background check or, for some agencies, a security clearance that takes longer than the semester itself. Simultaneously, you file the school's paperwork—placement approval form, learning objectives, supervisor contact information—so the faculty director can confirm the site meets Standard 304.

If you want a placement your school has never used, ask whether it will approve a new site. Most externship directors will, but they need lead time to vet the supervisor and execute the written agreement.

You are not a lawyer, and unauthorized practice rules apply to you. Every state has a student practice rule—usually a supreme court rule or bar admission rule—that lets a certified law student appear in court, take depositions, or negotiate on a client's behalf under the supervision of a licensed attorney. Eligibility conditions vary: many states require that you have completed a set portion of your J.D. (commonly two-thirds, or all first-year courses), be certified by your dean, and have written client consent and a supervising attorney present or available. Federal district courts often have their own local rule with separate certification. Ask your externship director which certification you need and file it before day one, because it is not retroactive.

Confidentiality binds you as it binds your supervisor. That includes what you tell your externship seminar. Most schools require you to write journals in a way that omits client-identifying detail, and to get supervisor permission before using any work product as a job-market writing sample.

Judicial externships carry extra restrictions. You will see draft opinions and internal deliberations; you may not discuss pending cases with anyone outside chambers, including classmates. You should also expect a conflicts screen if you later join a firm handling a case you touched, and you must disclose the externship on conflicts forms.

Finally, government placements typically require a conflict-of-interest check and may restrict outside employment during the placement. A prosecutor's office generally will not let you extern there while also working for a criminal defense firm.

Take a clinic if you want maximum responsibility, close faculty mentorship, and a supervisor who will know your work well enough to write a detailed recommendation. Clinic faculty are on the tenure or clinical track and are professionally invested in teaching you; a busy AUSA supervising four externs may not be.

Take an externship if you want to test a specific practice setting before committing to it, build a network inside an employer you want to work for, or access a market your school's clinics do not cover. Externships are also the reliable path into judicial chambers and federal agencies, and they convert to job offers more often than people assume—many U.S. Attorney's offices, public defenders, and in-house departments hire from their extern pools.

Doing both is the strongest résumé. If you can only do one and you are undecided about practice area, extern first and clinic second.