Law school report cards never tell the whole story. Two students can graduate with near-identical CGPAs, and one walks into a Tier 1 firm interview with five mooting trophies, a published paper, and a year of legal aid casework, while the other has spent five years quietly attending lectures and going home. The difference between them was never made in a classroom. It was made in committee rooms, moot court chambers, NGO field visits, and late nights formatting a journal submission before a deadline.
This guide is an attempt to map that entire ecosystem in one place: every major category of extracurricular activity a law student in India is likely to encounter, what it actually involves once you strip away the brochure language, how to get into it, and how to use it well. Some of these activities will matter for placements. Some will matter for your own growth as a lawyer, which is a different thing entirely and arguably more important. A few will matter for both, and those are usually worth prioritising early.
1. Why Extracurriculars Matter in Law School
- The Reality of Law School Beyond the Classroom
Most law degrees are built on the assumption that legal knowledge creates a lawyer. In reality, legal knowledge is only the starting point. By the third or fourth year, most students know the same cases, statutes, and doctrines. What distinguishes one profile from another is what a student does outside the classroom. A moot court participant learns legal argumentation through research, strategy, and advocacy in ways lectures cannot replicate. Similarly, students involved in legal aid clinics gain firsthand experience understanding clients and translating real-world problems into legal solutions. These are not merely extracurricular activities, they are practical legal training.
- How Recruiters Actually Read Your CV
When recruiters review applications, they look for evidence of skills and initiative. A moot court achievement may signal research and advocacy skills, a journal publication reflects independent academic work, and internships demonstrate practical exposure to the legal profession. Recruiters value contribution over participation. Being part of a society is far less important than showing what you researched, organised, wrote, or achieved through it.
- Skills You Cannot Learn from Textbooks
Many essential legal skills develop only through practice. Negotiation, for instance, cannot be mastered by reading theory alone; it requires repeated exposure to real or simulated bargaining situations. The same is true for drafting. Understanding contract law is different from drafting a clause that effectively protects a client’s interests.
- Why Extracurriculars Matter for Well-Being
Extracurricular activities also provide a much-needed balance to the pressures of law school. Societies, sports teams, and cultural groups create spaces where conversations extend beyond grades, internships, and placements. Students who remain engaged in at least one non-academic activity often report better stress management and resilience. In a demanding environment where burnout is common, these outlets can be just as important as academic success.
2. Mooting and Advocacy
2.1 Moot Court Competitions
What Mooting Actually Involves
A moot court competition is a simulated court proceeding built around a hypothetical case, usually a fictional dispute drafted specifically for the competition, raising genuine, often unsettled questions of law. Teams of two or three students are assigned to represent either the Petitioner/Appellant or Respondent side (sometimes both, in different rounds), and are given a “moot proposition” weeks in advance.
The actual work happens in three distinct phases. First comes research and memorial drafting: breaking the proposition into discrete legal issues, researching case law, statutes, and academic commentary for both sides of each issue, and compiling this into a written memorial – a formal document resembling a written submission to a court, complete with a Statement of Jurisdiction, Statement of Facts, Issues Raised, Summary of Arguments, and detailed Arguments Advanced, all backed by an Index of Authorities. Second comes oral rounds, where teams argue their written submissions before a panel of judges (usually practicing lawyers, academics, or sitting/retired judges), who interrupt with questions designed to test whether the team actually understands the law they’ve cited or is simply reading off a script. Third, in competitions that go beyond the preliminary rounds, comes adaptation, adjusting arguments on the fly based on how earlier rounds went, what the bench seemed receptive to, and what the opposing team’s strategy turned out to be.
The skill being tested isn’t really “knowing the law.” It’s the ability to take a body of law that’s often genuinely ambiguous or split across jurisdictions, and construct the most persuasive coherent narrative for your assigned side, even when, privately, you might think the other side has the stronger case. This is, in miniature, what advocacy actually is.
National vs. International Moots to know
Within India, certain national-level moots have built reputations that travel with a student’s CV well beyond the competition itself. The Surana & Surana National Corporate Law Moot Court Competition is one of the oldest and most prestigious, focused on corporate and commercial law. The Manu Nyaychetna Trust National Moot Court Competition, the NLSIU Moot Court Society’s competitions, and university-specific memorial competitions hosted by institutions across the country (often named after distinguished jurists) are also widely respected, and provide excellent early-career mooting experience because they tend to be more accessible to first and second-year teams than the absolute top-tier circuit.
On the international stage, the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition is the gold standard for public international law, extraordinarily competitive, and a Jessup national round appearance (let alone an international round) carries significant weight. The Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot, held in Vienna, is the equivalent for international arbitration and commercial law, and is particularly valued by firms with arbitration practices. The Price Media Law Moot Court Competition focuses on media law and freedom of expression and has grown significantly in prestige over the last decade.
How to get started as a First-year
The single biggest mistake first-years make with mooting is waiting. The instinct is understandable; first-year students often feel they don’t yet know enough substantive law to compete. In reality, most first-year-friendly moots are deliberately designed around foundational areas (constitutional law, contract law, criminal law) precisely because the organisers know the participants are early in their degree.
The practical entry point is usually your college’s moot court society or moot court association, which typically runs internal selection trials at the start of each academic year. These trials simulate a small-scale moot, often just oral arguments on a short proposition, sometimes with a brief memorial component, and are used to select teams for the year’s external competitions. Attending even if you don’t make the cut for the first external competition is valuable; most societies keep a pool of “reserve” researchers and second-string speakers who get folded into teams for subsequent competitions, and that’s often how second and third mooting opportunities open up.
The other practical step: find a senior who moots, and ask if you can sit in on their research sessions or help compile their Index of Authorities for an upcoming competition. This is unglamorous work, checking that every citation in a memorial actually says what the memorial claims it says, formatting case citations consistently, cross-referencing footnotes, but it’s also exactly how most experienced mooters started, and it teaches you the mechanics of memorial drafting faster than any lecture could.
2.2 Mock Trial Competitions
Difference between Mooting and Mock Trials
Mooting and mock trials are often confused, but they test fundamentally different skills. A moot court competition is appellate in character, it simulates arguments before an appellate court (a High Court or Supreme Court bench), where the facts of the case are fixed, not in dispute, and the entire contest is over questions of law: how should the law be interpreted and applied to these settled facts?
A mock trial, by contrast, simulates a trial court proceeding, typically a criminal trial, where the facts themselves are contested. Mock trial competitions involve examining and cross-examining witnesses (played by other competitors or assigned actors), presenting and objecting to evidence, and making opening and closing statements to a “jury” or bench. The skill set is closer to litigation practice: thinking on your feet during cross-examination, knowing the rules of evidence well enough to object in real time, and constructing a narrative for the judge or jury based on live testimony, not pre-written.
For a student who enjoys moot court research and argumentation but finds the format too removed from “what a courtroom is actually like,” mock trial competitions offer a closer simulation of trial advocacy and are particularly valuable for students leaning toward criminal litigation as a career path.
Key Competitions in India
The Bombay Bar Association and several National Law Universities run mock trial competitions, often modelled loosely on international formats. NUJS Kolkata, NLU Delhi, and a number of other institutions have hosted mock trial events focused on criminal procedure and evidence law. These tend to be less numerous than moot court competitions on the Indian circuit, which is precisely why students interested in trial advocacy should actively seek them out rather than assume they’ll come up in the normal flow of mooting announcements.
2.3 Client Counselling Competitions
What They Test and Why Firms Love Them
A Client Counselling Competition simulates a lawyer-client consultation, typically the very first meeting between a lawyer and a client who has come in with a legal problem. Two-member teams are given a brief problem statement shortly before the round (sometimes with very little prep time) and must then conduct a 25–30 minute consultation with an actor playing the client, who has been briefed with additional facts the students don’t initially have access to.
What’s being judged is almost the opposite of mooting. There’s no oratory, no aggressive argumentation, no “winning” a legal point. Instead, judges assess: did the team build rapport with the client and make them feel heard? Did they ask the right questions to draw out facts the client hadn’t volunteered? Did they correctly identify the legal and non-legal dimensions of the problem? Did they explain the client’s options in plain language, without jargon, and help the client make an informed decision, without imposing the lawyer’s own preference?
Firms, particularly those with strong client-facing practices, and increasingly in-house legal teams, value this competition disproportionately to how much attention it gets on the student moot circuit, precisely because client communication is a skill most law graduates are weak at and most firms have to train from scratch. A student who’s done well at client counselling has, in a very real sense, already had practice at the part of lawyering that law school teaches least.
How to Prepare
Preparation for client counselling is almost entirely about practice rounds, not legal research. The Bar Council of India and several universities run client counselling competitions, often as part of broader inter-collegiate “skills” competitions alongside mooting and arbitration. The best preparation is repeatedly running through mock client interviews with a partner, taking turns being the lawyer and the client, and getting feedback specifically on listening behaviour: did you interrupt? Did you ask leading questions that boxed the client into an answer? Did you summarise back what the client said to confirm understanding? These small habits are what separates a good client counselling team from an average one, far more than legal knowledge does.
2.4 Negotiation Competitions
Overview and Top Competitions
Negotiation competitions place two teams on opposite sides of a confidential negotiation scenario, often a commercial dispute, a settlement negotiation, or a transactional deal (like a business sale or partnership agreement) each given their own set of “confidential instructions” containing facts, priorities, and constraints the other side doesn’t know about. Teams then negotiate directly with each other, with judges observing and scoring based on both the substantive outcome reached and the negotiation process itself (preparation, strategy, communication, ethical conduct).
The International Chamber of Commerce runs a well-known international mediation and negotiation competition, and several Indian law schools run negotiation rounds as part of broader ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) competitions, often alongside mediation and arbitration components. The Negotiation Challenge, an international competition with regional rounds, is also increasingly on Indian students’ radar.
Why this matters for your career
Negotiation is arguably the most universally transferable skill on this entire list, relevant whether you end up in litigation (settlement negotiations), transactional corporate practice (deal terms), or even non-legal careers. Unlike mooting, where the “performance” is largely solo (even in team mooting, each speaker delivers their own submissions), negotiation is inherently interactive and reactive, your strategy has to adapt in real time to what the other side reveals, which makes it one of the better simulations of what actual legal practice feels like day to day.
3. Law Reviews and Journals
3.1 Writing for Your College Journal
How the selection process usually works
Most law schools run at least one student-edited law journal or law review, typically published annually or bi-annually, covering either general legal topics or a specific subject area (constitutional law, IP, international law, and so on are common specialisations). These journals operate on a peer-review-style process, even at the student level: a Call for Papers goes out (usually with a theme or set of suggested sub-themes), submissions come in over several weeks, and an editorial board, composed of senior students, sometimes with faculty oversight, reviews submissions for both substantive quality and adherence to a citation format (often a variant of the Bluebook, OSCOLA, or a journal-specific house style).
Getting selected for the editorial board itself is often a separate, earlier process, usually involving a written test (sometimes a short research and drafting exercise, sometimes a citation-correction or proofreading test) conducted at the start of an academic year. Editorial board positions are valuable in their own right, independent of whether you ever submit a paper, because they teach two things simultaneously: how academic legal writing is actually evaluated (which makes you a better writer yourself), and meticulous attention to citation accuracy, a skill that translates directly into memorial drafting, research assistantship work, and eventually legal practice, where a misattributed citation in a court filing is not a minor embarrassment.
What makes a good submission
The most common reason student submissions get rejected isn’t poor legal knowledge, it’s a failure to identify a genuine gap or argument. A huge proportion of submissions to student journals are essentially well-written summaries of existing law on a topic, with a concluding paragraph that says something like “thus, reform is needed” without specifying what reform, why, or how it would address the problems described.
A submission that stands out typically does one of three things: it identifies a genuine doctrinal inconsistency (for instance, conflicting High Court interpretations of the same statutory provision that the Supreme Court hasn’t yet resolved, and argues for which interpretation is correct and why); it applies an established legal principle to a genuinely novel factual context (emerging technology, a recent legislative change, an under-examined area of practice); or it offers a comparative analysis that draws a specific, actionable lesson from another jurisdiction’s approach to a problem India is currently grappling with, not just “the US does X, India should consider X,” but a reasoned argument for why X would or wouldn’t translate given differences in legal and institutional context.
3.2 External Law Reviews and Journals
Top student-run journals to submit to
Beyond your own institution’s journal, India has a strong ecosystem of student-run law reviews that accept submissions from students across the country. The NUJS Law Review, the NLSIR (NLS Business Law Review and the broader NLS Review), the Indian Journal of Law and Technology (from NLU Delhi), and the Christ University Law Journal are among the more established names, each with their own thematic focus and submission guidelines. Several of these also run “blog” arms, shorter, faster-turnaround pieces (covered more in 3.3) alongside their flagship peer-reviewed journals.
Submitting to an external journal carries more weight than a purely internal publication for one straightforward reason: it means your work was reviewed and accepted by people with no institutional incentive to accept it. That said, the bar is correspondingly higher, and rejection rates at well-regarded journals are steep, which is exactly why starting with your own college journal, getting feedback, and revising before attempting an external submission is generally the better sequence.
Open access vs. peer-reviewed publications
It’s worth understanding the distinction between open-access platforms (which publish quickly, often with lighter editorial review, and are freely accessible) and formally peer-reviewed journals (which involve a more rigorous, sometimes blind, review process, and may be indexed in academic databases). Both have their place. A peer-reviewed publication carries more academic weight, useful if you’re considering an LLM or academic career, while open-access platforms offer faster visibility and are often the better venue for time-sensitive commentary on recent legal developments, where the value lies in being early to the conversation rather than in formal academic indexing.
3.3 Blogging and Legal Commentary
Starting your own legal blog
A personal legal blog is one of the lowest-barrier, highest-visibility extracurriculars available, and one of the most underused. Unlike journal submissions, there’s no editorial gatekeeping; you can publish the day you finish writing. The trade-off is that the burden of quality control shifts entirely onto you, and a blog full of thin, derivative posts can do more reputational harm than good if a recruiter actually clicks through.
The students who get genuine value from blogging are usually the ones who pick a narrow enough niche that they can build a recognisable voice and follow a developing area of law over time — for instance, consistently writing about competition law enforcement actions, or data protection regulation as it evolves, or a specific area of constitutional litigation. A blog that’s effectively a running commentary on one evolving area of law, six months in, demonstrates sustained engagement in a way a single polished article never can.
Contributing to established platforms
For students not ready to maintain their own blog, contributing guest posts to established legal blogging platforms is often the better starting point. Bar and Bench, LiveLaw, and SCC Online Blog all publish student and practitioner commentary, and Bar and Bench in particular has a strong track record of publishing thoughtful student analysis of recent judgments. The editorial bar at these platforms is meaningfully higher than a personal blog; pieces get edited, sometimes substantially, and not everything submitted gets accepted, which is precisely what makes acceptance valuable as a credential and what makes the experience of going through their editorial process valuable as training.
A practical note worth flagging here, since it’s increasingly relevant: editorial teams at these platforms (and at student journals generally) have become noticeably more attentive to AI-generated submissions not because AI tools are banned outright, but because a submission that reads as generic, structurally templated, and lacking a specific argumentative throughline tends to get flagged during review, regardless of whether AI was actually involved in drafting it. The lesson generalises beyond AI: a submission needs a genuine point of view and specific engagement with the material, not just comprehensive coverage of a topic, to clear editorial review anywhere.
Building a writing portfolio early
The compounding value of blogging and commentary work is portfolio-building. By the time you’re applying for internships or training contracts, having a body of published writing, even five or six solid pieces across different platforms, gives recruiters something concrete to evaluate that a CV line (“strong writing skills”) never can. It’s also, practically, a body of work you can point to in interviews when asked “tell me about a time you had to research something you knew nothing about” a question almost every law firm interview includes in some form.
4. Internships and Clinical Experience
4.1 Court Internships
Why every law student should intern at court at least once
There is a specific kind of disorientation that happens the first time a law student sits through an actual court hearing, and it’s worth experiencing early rather than late. Court proceedings, especially in busy trial courts, often look nothing like the carefully paced exchanges depicted in moot court rounds or legal dramas. A judge might dispose of fifteen matters in the time it takes to read this paragraph, lawyers speak in a shorthand built from years of shared context with the bench, and the actual “argument” on a routine matter might last under two minutes.
A court internship, typically arranged with a judge (a District Court judge, a High Court judge, or occasionally a Supreme Court judge for senior students), places a student inside this environment as an observer and occasional research assistant, often tasked with reading case files, summarising pending matters, or researching points of law that come up in cases the judge is hearing. The value isn’t primarily the research output; it’s the exposure to how the machinery of the judicial system actually operates, which recalibrates a law student’s understanding of “the law” from something that exists in judgments and statutes to something that exists, messily, in an overburdened system run by people.
What to expect and how to find one
Court internships are typically arranged informally, through faculty contacts, seniors who’ve interned with a particular judge before, or direct applications to a judge’s office (though access varies significantly depending on the court and the judge). District Court internships tend to be more accessible for first and second-year students, while High Court and Supreme Court internships often go to students who’ve built a track record of prior internships or have stronger institutional connections.
Once arranged, expect a fairly unstructured experience compared to a law firm internship. Some judges actively involve interns in research for upcoming judgments; others primarily expect interns to observe court proceedings and maintain a journal of what they’ve seen. Either way, asking specific, well-prepared questions during any downtime, about a judge’s reasoning in a particular order, or about court procedure that seemed unusual, tends to be far more productive than waiting to be handed tasks.
4.2 Law Firm Internships
Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 vs. boutique firms – what’s right for you
The Indian law firm landscape is often informally categorised into tiers, though the boundaries are fuzzier than the terminology suggests. “Tier 1” generally refers to the largest full-service firms, those with substantial corporate, M&A, banking and finance, dispute resolution, and regulatory practices, handling high-value cross-border transactions. “Tier 2” firms are often strong in specific practice areas or regions without the same breadth, while boutique firms specialise deeply in one area, pure litigation boutiques, IP boutiques, competition law boutiques, and so on.
For a first or second-year student, the “right” internship is less about tier and more about exposure. A boutique litigation firm internship, where a small team handles a handful of active matters, often gives a student far more hands-on exposure, sitting in on client calls, drafting first cuts of documents, attending court with the associate; than a Tier 1 firm internship, where a first-year intern might spend most of the month doing due diligence document review as part of a large deal team, with limited visibility into the bigger picture.
That said, Tier 1 internships carry significant CV weight, particularly for students aiming for Tier 1 placements themselves, and the experience of working within a large, process-driven firm, understanding how matters are staffed, how billing works, how teams coordinate across practice groups – is itself useful exposure, even if the day-to-day tasks feel less “hands-on.” The practical approach many students take is to deliberately mix tiers across their internship history: a boutique or smaller-firm internship for depth of exposure earlier on, and at least one larger-firm internship before placements, for both the CV signal and the institutional exposure.
How to cold email and actually get responses
Cold emailing for internships is a numbers game, but not a spam game – a generic email sent to fifty firms with no customisation typically gets a near-zero response rate, while a smaller number of genuinely tailored emails performs meaningfully better. The components that matter: a subject line that’s specific (naming the practice area or even a particular matter the firm has publicly worked on, if relevant), a body that’s brief, three to four sentences explaining who you are, why this specific firm or practice area, and your availability, and a CV attached as a PDF with a sensible filename (not “CV (4) final final.pdf”).
The “why this firm” line is where most cold emails fall flat, because most students write something generic (“I am very interested in your firm’s work in corporate law”) that could apply to any firm. A version that references something specific, a recent matter the firm advised on that was reported in the legal press, or a particular partner’s published writing on a topic the student is interested in – signals that the email wasn’t sent to fifty firms simultaneously, even if, realistically, it was sent to several.
4.3 NGO and Policy Internships
Why they matter beyond corporate law
NGO and policy internships are sometimes treated as a “filler” category for students who haven’t yet landed a law firm internship, which understates what they actually offer. Internships with organisations working on human rights litigation, environmental law, labour rights, RTI (Right to Information) advocacy, or policy research with think tanks expose students to an entirely different model of legal work, one where the “client” might be a community rather than a corporation, where outcomes are measured over years rather than in a single transaction, and where research often directly feeds into draft legislation, policy submissions to government consultations, or strategic litigation.
For students considering careers in public interest law, policy, or academia, or simply wanting a more rounded understanding of how law operates outside commercial practice, these internships are not a substitute for corporate or litigation exposure; they are a genuinely different and complementary kind of exposure. Increasingly, even corporate recruiters view a policy or NGO internship favourably, as it signals a candidate who can think about legal issues from a regulatory or public-interest perspective, a valuable skill in regulatory- and compliance-heavy practice areas.
Notable organisations to approach
Organisations such as the Centre for Policy Research, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and various state and national Legal Services Authorities run structured internship programmes. Environmental law-focused organisations and litigation chambers working on public interest litigation (PIL) before High Courts and the Supreme Court are also worth approaching directly, many operate with small teams where an intern’s contribution to ongoing research is genuinely substantive rather than peripheral.
4.4 In-House Legal Internships
An underrated option most students overlook
In-house legal teams (the legal departments of companies, as opposed to law firms representing those companies) rarely feature prominently in law school internship discussions, largely because in-house teams advertise internships far less aggressively than law firms do. This is a missed opportunity, because in-house legal work offers a perspective most students never otherwise encounter: what it looks like to be the client.
An in-house internship typically involves reviewing commercial contracts from the perspective of the business signing them (rather than drafting them from scratch for a counterparty), advising internal business teams on regulatory questions in plain, actionable language, and seeing how legal risk gets weighed against commercial considerations in real time, a negotiation that happens internally, between the legal team and the business, well before any external negotiation with a counterparty begins.
For students interested eventually in in-house careers (an increasingly common and well-compensated path for experienced lawyers), or simply in understanding “the other side” of the law firm-client relationship, reaching out directly to the legal departments of companies, particularly mid-sized companies, which are more likely to have informal internship arrangements than large multinationals with formal HR processes, is worth the extra effort of finding the right contact.
4.5 Judicial Clerkships
What they are and how they shape your career
A judicial clerkship is a more formal, typically longer-term (often one year) position assisting a judge, most prominently, clerkships with Supreme Court of India judges, though several High Courts have also developed formal clerkship programmes (most notably the Madras High Court and a few others that have run structured “Research Associate” or law clerk schemes). Unlike a short internship, a clerkship involves sustained, deep engagement with a judge’s docket, drafting research memos on pending matters, sometimes contributing to the drafting of judgments (within appropriate limits), and developing a genuinely close understanding of judicial reasoning from the inside.
Supreme Court clerkships are highly competitive and typically go to students with exceptionally strong academic records, often combined with significant prior internship experience at the apex court or in appellate litigation. For students seriously considering litigation, academia, or judicial service as a career path, a clerkship is widely regarded as one of the most formative experiences available. Clerks often describe it as learning more about how law actually gets decided in one year than in the rest of law school combined. Even for students headed toward corporate practice, a clerkship (where pursued, usually by students who take a year before joining a firm) carries substantial prestige and is increasingly recognised by Tier 1 firms as valuable preparation, particularly for dispute resolution practices.
5. Legal Aid and Pro Bono Work
5.1 Your College Legal Aid Committee
What they do and why you should join
Almost every law school has a legal aid committee or legal aid cell, usually operating under the broader umbrella of the institution’s legal aid clinic (many of which are formally affiliated with state Legal Services Authorities under the Legal Services Authorities Act). These committees organise the practical activities described in the next two sub-sections: legal awareness camps, clinic sessions, documentation drives, and represent the most accessible entry point for a student who wants hands-on exposure to real legal problems faced by people who, in most cases, have never consulted a lawyer before and may not fully understand that their problem even has a legal dimension.
Joining a legal aid committee in first or second year is one of the few extracurriculars where the “selection” barrier is genuinely low, most committees are actively looking for volunteers, because the work (running awareness sessions, helping draft applications for government schemes, accompanying senior members to legal aid clinics) scales with the number of willing students far more than mooting or journal work does. It’s also one of the few activities that gives a first-year student direct, if supervised, contact with actual legal problems, something that otherwise doesn’t happen until internships begin.
5.2 Street Law and Community Outreach
Taking legal awareness beyond campus
Street Law programmes, a model with origins in legal education in the United States but now adapted by law schools across India, involve law students conducting legal literacy sessions in schools, community centres, prisons, or rural areas, covering topics like fundamental rights, the legal process for filing a complaint, laws against domestic violence, or labour rights, pitched at an audience with no legal background.
The pedagogical value of Street Law runs in both directions. For the community being addressed, it’s often the first time complex legal concepts, what a First Information Report actually is, what rights a person has during police questioning, how to access free legal aid, are explained in accessible language rather than legal jargon. For the law student delivering the session, it’s an exercise in translation: taking something you understand in technical legal terms and explaining it so a twelve-year-old, or an adult with no formal education, genuinely understands it. Students who’ve done sustained Street Law work often describe it as the single activity that most improved their ability to explain legal concepts simply, a skill that turns out to be exactly what client counselling competitions test, and exactly what real client interactions demand.
5.3 Working with Legal Aid Clinics
Real casework experience as a student
Beyond awareness sessions, many legal aid clinics, particularly those affiliated with District Legal Services Authorities, involve students in actual casework under the supervision of practicing advocates: helping a client draft an application for compensation under a government scheme, assisting with documentation for a bail application, or helping someone understand the status of a case that’s been pending in court for years (a depressingly common scenario that, for many students, is the first time they encounter the practical meaning of “justice delayed”).
This is meaningfully different from a law firm internship, where a student is generally one of several layers removed from the client. In a legal aid clinic, a student might be the only person from the “legal side” a client interacts with directly during a visit, which comes with real responsibility (always under supervision, and always within appropriate ethical boundaries for a student who is not yet a qualified advocate), but also an unmatched sense of what it means for legal work to directly, immediately affect someone’s life. For students who eventually want to practice in any client-facing capacity, this kind of early exposure to the human stakes of legal work is difficult to replicate through any other extracurricular on this list.
6. Debate, MUNs, and Public Speaking
6.1 Parliamentary Debate
Why law students thrive here
Parliamentary debate, the competitive debating format used across most Indian university debating circuits, modelled loosely on the British Parliamentary or Asian Parliamentary styles, rewards exactly the skills law school selects for and develops further: structuring an argument under time pressure, anticipating and pre-empting counterarguments, and maintaining composure while being directly challenged (through Points of Information, the debate equivalent of a judge’s interruption in a moot).
Many of the strongest mooters in any given law school cohort also have a debating background, and the relationship runs both ways, debating before law school often produces students who pick up mooting quickly, while law students who take up debating during their degree often find their legal training gives them an edge in structuring arguments, even on debate motions that have nothing to do with law (climate policy, social issues, economic questions).
How it translates to courtroom skills
The specific skill that transfers most directly is “thinking on your feet under structured interruption” in parliamentary debate. Opposing speakers can raise Points of Information during your speech, which you can choose to accept or decline, but which you must respond to coherently if accepted, all while keeping your overall argument on track. This is close to the experience of fielding bench questions during a moot court oral round, where a judge’s question can derail an unprepared speaker entirely, while a well-practiced one weaves the answer back into their argument seamlessly.
6.2 Model United Nations (MUN)
Is it still worth it in law school?
MUNs occupy an interesting position in the law school extracurricular landscape, extremely popular at the school and early undergraduate level, but with diminishing marginal value as a CV credential the further a student progresses through law school, particularly if a CV lists multiple MUNs without any indication of escalating responsibility or outcome.
That said, MUN experience retains genuine value for students interested in international law, diplomacy, or international organisations as career paths, the format (representing a country’s position on an issue, negotiating resolutions with other delegates, navigating procedural rules) does build research and negotiation skills relevant to international legal practice. The honest assessment: one or two MUNs, particularly ones with strong reputations or specialised committees (legal committees, International Court of Justice simulations), are a reasonable addition early in law school, but a law student’s time from second year onward is generally better invested in mooting, journal work, or internships, all of which carry more weight specifically within legal recruitment.
Chairing vs. delegating — what to aim for
For students who do continue with MUN involvement into law school, chairing a committee (rather than delegating) tends to be the more valuable role, chairing involves managing debate, applying procedural rules fairly, and synthesising delegate positions into a workable resolution, which is closer to a quasi-judicial or chairperson role than to advocacy. A law student who has chaired a committee at a well-regarded MUN has a more distinctive story to tell than one who has delegated at several.
6.3 Elocution and Declamation
Often overlooked but genuinely useful
Elocution and declamation competitions, essentially structured public speaking competitions on a given topic, often with no debate or rebuttal component, just a prepared (or sometimes extempore) speech, have fallen out of fashion relative to mooting and MUNs, but remain one of the most direct ways to build raw public speaking confidence without the added complexity of legal argumentation or debate format rules.
For a student who finds the idea of mooting intimidating primarily because of public speaking anxiety rather than the legal research itself, elocution competitions offer a lower-stakes environment to build comfort with speaking before an audience, a foundational skill that mooting, client counselling, and eventually courtroom advocacy all assume you already have. Several law schools and inter-collegiate cultural festivals still run elocution events, often alongside debate and quiz competitions, and they’re worth not dismissing simply because they feel like a “school-level” activity, the confidence built transfers directly upward.
7. Student Societies and Committees
7.1 Academic and Subject-Specific Societies
Constitutional law, IP, corporate law, criminal law societies
Most law schools host a constellation of subject-specific societies, a constitutional law society, an IP law society, a corporate/business law society, a criminal law society, an arbitration society, and increasingly societies focused on emerging areas like technology law, environmental law, or competition law. These societies typically organise guest lectures, panel discussions, internal moots or case discussion sessions, reading groups, and sometimes their own smaller publications or newsletters within their subject area.
Why subject depth matters early
The value of joining a subject-specific society early isn’t really about the events themselves, it’s about exposure to a community of students and faculty with a shared interest, which compounds over time. A second-year student who’s been attending an IP law society’s reading group sessions for a year, discussing recent Supreme Court and High Court IP judgments with peers and faculty, walks into a third-year IP internship with a frame of reference that a student encountering IP law for the first time during that internship simply doesn’t have. Subject-specific societies are, in effect, a low-stakes way to “specialise early” without committing to anything, you can attend a constitutional law society’s sessions for a semester, decide it’s not for you, and pivot to another society without any cost, which is a luxury the internship and job market doesn’t offer later.
7.2 Cultural and Performing Arts Societies
The case for not letting this side of you go
It’s worth saying directly: cultural societies: music, dance, theatre, art, literary societies, rarely appear on a CV in a way that affects legal recruitment, and that’s precisely why they’re valuable. Law school has a tendency to narrow students’ identities down to “the law student” in a way that can be genuinely corrosive over five years, particularly for students who arrived with strong creative or artistic interests they then quietly abandon because “it doesn’t help with placements.”
Beyond the wellbeing argument made in Section 1, there’s also a less obvious professional argument: students who maintain a creative outlet throughout law school often report it directly improves their legal work, particularly drafting and oral advocacy, both of which are, underneath the legal terminology, exercises in narrative and performance. A student who’s spent years in theatre, used to inhabiting a role and reading an audience, often brings a noticeably different quality to oral mooting rounds than a student for whom public performance is entirely unfamiliar.
7.3 Sports Committees
Physical wellbeing and team dynamics
Sports committees, organising inter-college tournaments, intramural leagues, and representing the institution at university-level sporting events, serve a function that’s easy to underrate in a profession that, statistically, has serious problems with sedentary lifestyles and stress-related health issues developing early in legal careers. Building a habit of regular physical activity during law school, through a sports team or committee rather than as an isolated individual activity, has the added benefit of embedding that habit within a social structure which research on habit formation consistently shows makes habits more durable than purely individual commitments.
There’s also a team dynamics dimension that’s underappreciated: students involved in competitive team sports throughout law school often describe the experience of high-pressure team coordination, communicating under time pressure, recovering from a bad performance in real time, trusting teammates to execute their part of a plan, as directly transferable to team mooting, where exactly these dynamics determine whether a team’s individually strong members actually perform well together.
7.4 Student Bar Associations
Leadership, governance, and student representation
A Student Bar Association (SBA) or equivalent student government body is the primary mechanism through which students participate in the governance of their own institution, representing student concerns to faculty and administration, organising institution-wide events, and managing significant budgets and logistics for everything from orientation programmes to annual fests.
Holding a position in an SBA, particularly an elected position, is one of the few extracurriculars that directly demonstrates leadership and organisational management at scale, in a context where the stakes (managing real budgets, navigating institutional politics, being accountable to an electorate of peers) are genuinely significant, not simulated. For students aiming toward roles that will eventually involve people management, which is most senior legal roles, eventually, SBA experience is one of the more concrete, verifiable demonstrations of that capacity available during law school, and interviewers at the senior associate and partner level often probe SBA experience specifically because it’s one of the few CV lines that reliably indicates real accountability.
7.5 Entrepreneurship and Startup Cells
For those eyeing legal tech or independent practice
A growing number of law schools have established entrepreneurship cells or innovation cells, often in partnership with the broader university’s incubation infrastructure where the law school is part of a larger university. These cells run startup pitch competitions, host founders (including legal tech founders) for talks, and sometimes provide structured support for students working on their own ventures.
For law students specifically, the relevance has grown substantially as “legal tech” software for contract review, legal research, case management, compliance automation has become a genuine and well-funded sector, with several legal tech startups founded or co-founded by law graduates rather than purely technical founders. A law student with an idea for a legal tech product, or simply an interest in how legal services might be delivered differently, finds in an entrepreneurship cell one of the only structured spaces in a law school where that kind of thinking is actively encouraged rather than treated as a distraction from “real” legal study. Even for students who never start a venture themselves, exposure to how startups think about problems iterating quickly, validating assumptions with real users, building something incrementally rather than waiting for a “perfect” plan is a useful counterweight to the often slow, precedent-bound way legal education approaches problems.
8. Research and Academic Work
8.1 Working as a Research Assistant
How to approach professors
Becoming a research assistant (RA) to a faculty member is one of the more direct paths into serious academic legal work, but it’s also one of the extracurriculars students are most hesitant to pursue, often because they assume professors only take on RAs they already know well, or that RA positions are formally advertised (they often aren’t).
In practice, the most effective approach is specific and modest: after a class or during office hours, approaching a professor whose subject genuinely interests you, ideally having done some reading beyond the syllabus that you can reference, and asking whether they have any ongoing research where assistance with a discrete task (a literature review on a narrow sub-topic, compiling case law on a specific point, formatting citations for a paper in progress) would be useful. The key word is discrete: professors are far more likely to say yes to “could I help with X specific task for your paper on Y” than to “I’d like to be your research assistant,” which sounds like a commitment they may not have bandwidth to manage or supervise.
What the work actually looks like
RA work is rarely glamorous in the moment, it’s often exactly the kind of granular research and citation-checking work described elsewhere in this guide (in journal editorial work, for instance). The difference is context: as an RA, that granular work feeds directly into a professor’s ongoing research, which means exposure to how a research question evolves from an initial idea into a publishable argument, including all the dead ends, refinements, and “actually, let’s look at this from a different angle” moments that never appear in the final published paper. For a student considering an academic career, or simply curious about what legal scholarship looks like from the inside, this is uniquely valuable exposure that essentially can’t be replicated any other way as an undergraduate.
8.2 Co-Authoring Papers
Getting published as an undergraduate
Co-authorship with a faculty member or a senior researcher is the most common path to genuine academic publication as a law student, and it’s worth being honest that solo undergraduate publication in well-regarded journals, while not impossible (as discussed in Section 3), is considerably rarer than co-authored work, where a faculty member’s involvement both improves the paper’s quality and lends it credibility with editors.
Co-authorship typically grows organically out of RA work, a student who’s done substantial research for a professor’s paper, and contributed genuinely original analysis or framing along the way, may be offered co-authorship as that contribution is recognised. This is also why approaching RA work with genuine intellectual engagement, rather than treating it as purely mechanical labour, matters: the students who end up with co-authorship credits are consistently the ones who, at some point during the research process, said something like “actually, have we considered that this line of cases might be explained differently if we look at it through X lens” and turned out to be right.
8.3 Attending and Presenting at Conferences
Student conferences worth knowing about
Several Indian law schools and academic institutions run student conferences sometimes standalone, sometimes attached to a journal’s annual theme, where students can submit papers (often shorter than full journal submissions, sometimes in the form of conference abstracts) and, if accepted, present them to an audience of peers and faculty, often with a discussant or respondent providing feedback.
The value of presenting at a conference, distinct from publishing, is the experience of defending an argument in real time, in front of an audience that may include people with genuinely different views on the topic closer to a viva or thesis defence than to mooting, but drawing on similar underlying skills (knowing your argument well enough to handle unexpected questions about it). For students considering an LLM or further academic study, conference presentation experience is also something LLM admissions committees specifically look for, as it’s one of the few undergraduate activities that mirrors the format of academic life at the postgraduate level.
9. Online Presence and Personal Branding
9.1 LinkedIn for Law Students
What your profile should look like by second year
LinkedIn occupies an odd space for law students widely used, but often poorly, with profiles that are either entirely blank beyond a profile photo and education section, or, at the other extreme, cluttered with every certificate from every two-day online course the student has ever completed, which dilutes rather than strengthens the profile.
By second year, a law student’s LinkedIn profile is well served by three things: a headline that says something more specific than “Law Student at [University]” ideally indicating an area of interest (“Law Student | Interested in Competition Law & Regulatory Practice”), a summary section that briefly contextualises what the student is working on (without simply restating the CV), and, most importantly, an “Activity” feed that isn’t empty. This last point matters because recruiters who check LinkedIn (and many do, particularly for internship applications) are looking for signs of genuine engagement: has this student commented thoughtfully on a recent judgment? Shared an article from Bar and Bench with their own brief take? An empty activity feed reads as a profile that exists only because someone said it should.
Posting that adds value vs. posting that doesn’t
The line between valuable LinkedIn activity and noise is fairly clear once you look for it: a post that says “Excited to share I attended [event]!” with a group photo adds essentially nothing and, posted often enough, can actively read as performative. A post that briefly explains why a recent judgment matters, written in the student’s own words, with a specific point of view, even a short one, demonstrates exactly the kind of engagement discussed throughout Section 3 on blogging, in a format that takes minutes rather than the hours a full blog post requires.
9.2 Writing on Medium or Substack
Building an audience before you graduate
Medium and Substack occupy a middle ground between a personal blog (Section 3.3) and contributing to established legal platforms lower barrier to entry than pitching to Bar and Bench or LiveLaw, but with built-in discovery mechanisms (Medium’s recommendation algorithm, Substack’s subscription model) that a standalone personal blog lacks.
For law students specifically, a Substack newsletter focused on a niche area translating recent regulatory developments in a specific sector, for instance, or summarising significant judgments in an area of law for a non-specialist audience can build a small but genuinely engaged readership over time, including, occasionally, practitioners in that area who find the summaries useful. The honest caveat: building any kind of audience takes sustained consistency over months, and a Substack with three posts and a six-month gap does more harm than not having one this is an extracurricular that rewards commitment more than most others on this list, and is worth starting only if you’re realistically prepared to maintain it.
9.3 Legal Podcasts and YouTube
Is this worth exploring?
Legal content on podcasts and YouTube, explaining legal concepts, discussing recent cases, interviewing practitioners, has grown significantly, and a small number of law students have built genuinely substantial followings through consistent legal content creation. For most students, though, this is best understood as a high-effort, high-variance extracurricular: the production overhead (recording, editing, even just the comfort of being on camera or mic) is considerably higher than writing, and the audience-building dynamics of video and audio platforms are less forgiving of inconsistency than even Substack.
The honest assessment: if a student already has some interest or aptitude in content creation, has run a YouTube channel before, or enjoys podcast-style conversation, channelling that toward legal content can be a genuinely distinctive addition to a profile, partly because so few law students do it well. But for a student starting from zero interest in content creation purely because “it might look good,” the time is very likely better spent on writing-based options (Sections 3 and 9.2), which have a much lower barrier to entry and more predictable returns on effort.
10. Skill-Based Certifications and Courses
10.1 Arbitration and ADR Courses
Why ADR skills are increasingly valuable
Alternative Dispute Resolution, arbitration, mediation, and conciliation, has grown substantially in India, driven partly by court backlogs making litigation slower and more expensive, and partly by the increasing prevalence of arbitration clauses in commercial contracts, particularly cross-border ones. Several institutions offer certificate courses in arbitration law and practice, ranging from short online courses to more intensive programmes affiliated with arbitration institutions.
For students, a foundational arbitration course is useful less for the certificate itself and more because it makes sense of an area of practice that the standard law school curriculum often covers only superficially, despite arbitration being a significant and growing area of practice at most major firms. A student who’s done even a short arbitration course walks into a dispute resolution internship with a working vocabulary, seat versus venue, the difference between institutional and ad hoc arbitration, what a Section 34 challenge to an arbitral award actually involves, that otherwise has to be picked up on the fly.
10.2 Drafting and Contract Review Courses
Practical skills that internships expect
Drafting is one of the starkest gaps between law school curriculum and internship expectations. A student can complete a Contract Law course covering offer, acceptance, consideration, and breach in detail, and still have never actually drafted a contract clause, an indemnity provision, or a termination clause, the kind of document an internship at a corporate or transactional practice expects an intern to at least be able to attempt from day one.
Short, practical drafting and contract review courses, covering how to structure a commercial agreement, common clauses (representations and warranties, indemnity, limitation of liability, governing law and jurisdiction) and what each is actually trying to achieve, close this gap quickly. Several online platforms and some law schools offer such courses, often quite short (a few weeks), and the return on investment is high precisely because the skill gap they address is one that recruiters and supervising associates notice immediately during an internship, a student who can produce a reasonable first draft of a simple NDA without hand-holding stands out disproportionately to how “advanced” the skill actually is.
10.3 Foreign Language Courses
International law, cross-border practice, and why language matters
For students interested in international law, cross-border transactional work, or international arbitration (where proceedings are often conducted in English but documents and witnesses may not be), a working knowledge of a second major language, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, or others depending on the region of interest, can be a genuine differentiator, particularly for opportunities like the Vis Moot (Section 2.1), which is held in Vienna and where familiarity with civil law traditions and, often, French (a working language in many international arbitration and international law contexts) is useful.
Beyond the practical utility, language study also indirectly supports legal reasoning in a less obvious way: encountering legal concepts that don’t map neatly onto English legal vocabulary (civil law systems often have concepts with no direct common law equivalent) forces a student to think about what a legal concept actually means, rather than just what it’s called, a useful exercise in precision that benefits legal writing generally.
10.4 Tech and Legal Tech Literacy
Basic coding, AI tools, and what law firms are actually using
Legal practice has been steadily, if unevenly, adopting technology, e-discovery tools for litigation, contract lifecycle management software for transactional practices, AI-assisted legal research tools, and increasingly, generative AI tools for first-draft document generation, summarisation, and research assistance. A law student who arrives at a firm with zero familiarity with any of these tools isn’t necessarily disadvantaged in terms of legal ability, but is likely to face a steeper initial learning curve on the practical “how work actually gets done here” front than a student with even basic familiarity.
Basic coding literacy, not programming as a legal skill in itself, but enough familiarity with how software and data work to be comfortable with the increasingly technical aspects of practice areas like data protection, fintech regulation, and IP in software, is increasingly useful, even at a fairly basic level. Equally, developing a working understanding of how AI legal tools function (and, importantly, their limitations particularly around accuracy of AI-generated legal citations, which has caused well-documented problems in courts in multiple jurisdictions) positions a student to use these tools effectively and responsibly rather than either avoiding them entirely or relying on them uncritically both of which are increasingly seen as gaps by firms actively rolling out these tools internally.
11. How to Balance It All Without Burning Out
The honest truth about doing too much
If there’s one section in this guide that’s most likely to be skipped and most worth not skipping, it’s this one. Everything described above is genuinely valuable. None of it is something you should feel obligated to do all of, all at once, and the students who try almost universally end up doing everything at a mediocre level rather than a few things well.
The honest truth is that a CV listing eight different activities, each engaged with superficially, is less impressive to recruiters than a CV showing three or four activities with genuine depth and progression a moot win, a journal publication building on a year of editorial board work, sustained legal aid involvement. Recruiters can tell the difference between a student who joined eleven societies in first year because everyone else was doing it, and a student who made deliberate choices about where to invest time. The latter is also, not coincidentally, the student who’s less likely to be exhausted by third year.
How to prioritise by year of study
A reasonable heuristic: in any given semester, aim for one primary commitment (something that requires sustained, scheduled time a moot team, a journal editorial position, an SBA role) and one or two lighter, lower-commitment activities (a society membership with occasional events, legal aid clinic sessions a few times a semester, casual sports). Trying to run two primary commitments simultaneously, say, an active moot team alongside a demanding SBA role, during the same semester as internals is a common recipe for both activities, and academics, suffering.
It’s also worth being honest about cyclical timing: certain periods (the run-up to a moot’s oral rounds, journal submission deadlines, internship application seasons) are inherently high-intensity, and the goal isn’t to avoid intensity altogether but to avoid stacking multiple high-intensity periods on top of each other, and on top of academic deadlines, where avoidable. A moot team that knows their oral rounds fall in the same week as end-semester exams, for instance, is in a fundamentally harder position than one that doesn’t, and while competition dates aren’t always controllable, a student’s choice of which competitions to commit to, and when, often is.
A rough semester-by-semester guide
There’s no single correct sequence, but a pattern that works reasonably well for many students: early semesters (first year) are for exploration, try a moot court trial, attend a few different society events, do a legal aid session or two, see what genuinely engages you before committing deeply to anything. Middle semesters (second and third year) are for depth, this is when a primary commitment (mooting seriously, journal editorial work, an SBA role) tends to take shape, alongside internships during breaks. Later semesters (fourth and fifth year) often shift toward consolidation, fewer new commitments, more focus on internships, placement preparation, and finishing strong on whatever primary commitments are already underway (a final moot season, a capstone publication, handing over society or committee responsibilities to juniors in a way that leaves things in good shape).
12. A Year-by-Year Extracurricular Roadmap
Year | Focus Areas |
1st Year | Orientation, college societies, first internship, one moot |
2nd Year | Journal, legal aid, firm internships, competitions |
3rd Year | Research assistantship, leadership roles, publications |
4th Year | Specialisation, clerkships, personal branding |
5th Year | Consolidation, placements, giving back |
This roadmap is deliberately a starting frame rather than a rigid plan five-year and three-year law programmes, and individual circumstances, will shift the exact timing. But the underlying logic holds across most programmes: early exploration, middle-years depth and specialisation, and final-years consolidation and forward-looking preparation (whether that’s placements, further study, or clerkships).
One detail worth highlighting: “giving back” in the final year isn’t just a nice sentiment it’s how extracurricular ecosystems sustain themselves. The moot court society trial system that gave you your first mooting opportunity, the journal editorial board that taught a junior how to format citations, the legal aid committee senior who showed you how a clinic session runs all of it depends on senior students taking the time to pass that knowledge down, even when (especially when) they’re busy with placements and final-year pressures. A fifth-year student who mentors a first-year mooter, or hands over a well-organised set of editorial guidelines to the next journal board, leaves the ecosystem better than they found it which is, in its own way, exactly the kind of contribution this entire guide has been describing.
13. Frequently Asked Questions
Do grades matter more than extracurriculars?
Grades matter, particularly as a baseline most firms have some minimum CGPA threshold for shortlisting, and dropping significantly below your cohort’s norm can close doors regardless of extracurricular strength. But above that baseline, the marginal value of further grade improvement drops off quickly, while the marginal value of meaningful extracurricular depth doesn’t. In practice, most students are better served maintaining “good enough” grades while investing more heavily in one or two extracurriculars, than chasing marginal CGPA gains at the expense of everything else though “good enough” varies by institution and target firms, and is worth gauging from seniors’ actual placement outcomes rather than assumption.
When should I start mooting?
As early as your institution’s moot court society runs trials often within the first semester or two. As discussed in Section 2.1, first-year-friendly moots are deliberately designed for students early in their legal education, and the biggest risk isn’t starting too early, it’s waiting until a vague sense of “being ready” arrives, which for most students never quite does on its own.
Can I do too many things at once?
Yes, and Section 11 addresses this directly. The signal that you’ve taken on too much usually isn’t a single dramatic crisis it’s a quieter pattern of consistently being underprepared for everything, never quite catching up, and academics or sleep being the first things to slip. If that pattern’s been true for more than a few weeks, it’s worth consciously stepping back from at least one commitment, even if it feels like “giving up” a half-hearted contribution to four activities usually serves you, and those activities, worse than a strong contribution to three.
What do law firms actually look for?
As discussed across Section 1 and throughout this guide, firms generally look for depth and demonstrated contribution over breadth what did you actually do, not just where were you a member. Beyond that, firms look for specific signals depending on practice area: dispute resolution practices weight mooting, debating, and writing/research heavily; transactional practices weight drafting exposure, internship quality, and increasingly any demonstrated interest in the commercial or business side of legal work; and most practices, regardless of area, value some demonstration of genuine intellectual curiosity a journal publication, a sustained blog, or research work that shows a student thinks about the law beyond what’s required for exams.
Is it too late to start in third year?
No. though it does change what’s realistically achievable. A third-year student starting mooting for the first time can still build a meaningful track record by graduation, particularly if they’re selective about which competitions to target (perhaps prioritising one or two well-chosen competitions over trying to do everything). What’s less realistic in a compressed timeline is depth across many categories, a third-year student starting from zero is better served picking one or two areas from this guide and going deep, rather than spreading thin in an attempt to “catch up” across all of them. The students who struggle most are often those who, realising they’re “behind,” try to do everything at once in their remaining years, which tends to recreate exactly the burnout problem described in Section 11, on a compressed timeline.
Conclusion
If there’s a single thread running through everything in this guide, it’s that extracurriculars work best when they’re chosen rather than collected. Every category described here, mooting, journals, internships, legal aid, societies, research, online presence, certifications, can be either a genuine source of growth or a CV line with nothing behind it, and the difference has very little to do with which activities you pick and almost everything to do with how you engage with them.
Looking back, the activities that mattered most weren’t always the ones that looked most impressive on paper at the time. A legal aid clinic session that felt unremarkable in the moment can end up being the thing that, years later, shapes how you think about what law is actually for. A moot competition that didn’t go well can teach you more about argumentation than one that did, simply because losing forces you to confront exactly where the argument was weak. None of this is a substitute for being deliberate and reasonably strategic about CV-building, that matters too, and pretending otherwise would be naive. But if there’s one thing worth telling a first-year version of yourself, it’s this: do fewer things, but mean them. Five years is both much longer and much shorter than it feels right now, and what you’ll remember, and what will actually shape the lawyer you become, is rarely the activity itself, but what you chose to put into it.
About the author
Tina Chakraborty is a first-year law student at The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences with a keen interest in legal research, policy discourse, and emerging areas of law. A former Head Girl of Army Public School, she has consistently demonstrated excellence in academics, leadership, and communication.
She currently serves on the editorial teams of the Society for International Trade & Competition Law and the Intellectual Property and Technology Laws Society, contributing to research-oriented legal writing and academic initiatives. Tina was also the Runners-Up at the Inter APS National Debate Competition and achieved distinction as a State Topper in Class X and School Topper in Class XII.
With a strong research-oriented approach and an analytical editorial voice, she aspires to contribute meaningfully to contemporary legal and policy discussions.