The law’s own labor problem

EVERY year, hundreds of fresh law graduates walk into Pakistan’s leading chambers and firms for what is euphemistically called an “internship” or “pupillage.” Most will not be paid a rupee for months, sometimes years, of full-time work drafting pleadings, researching case law and sitting in on client meetings. Some will eventually be “made permanent” on a modest salary; many others will simply be replaced by the next batch of eager graduates willing to work for free.

This arrangement is so normalized within the legal fraternity that it is rarely discussed as a labor rights issue at all. It is treated, instead, as an inevitable rite of passage the price of admission into a prestigious profession. Yet a closer look suggests that Pakistan’s legal industry may be one of the starkest examples of unregulated, exploitative internship practice in the country, and one uniquely ill-placed to defend it, given that the profession exists to interpret and enforce the very laws it is quietly sidestepping.

The scale of the problem has been documented, if informally. Lawyers who have surveyed the profession describe junior associates at reputed firms completing unpaid stints stretching from three months to two years, often working full days while technically still “training.” The practice persists despite Pakistan’s Apprenticeship Ordinance, 1962, which was designed precisely to regulate structured on-the-job training and guarantee apprentices certain minimum protections. Law firms and chambers, however, rarely register their interns as apprentices under this law, leaving them in a legal no-man’s-land: neither students, nor employees, nor apprentices in the statutory sense.

This gap is compounded by the profession’s own regulator. The Pakistan Bar Council and provincial bar councils set the rules for enrolment, requiring aspiring advocates to complete a period of pupillage under a senior lawyer before they can be licensed. But neither the Legal Practitioners and Bar Councils Act, 1973, nor the rules made under it, mandate that this pupillage be paid. In effect, the very body responsible for admitting new lawyers to practice has built an unpaid apprenticeship requirement into the licensing process itself a far cry from professions such as medicine, where house officers, despite their own well-documented grievances, at least draw a government stipend during mandatory training.

The consequences fall unevenly. A law graduate from a well-off Lahore or Karachi household, who can rely on family support for rent and daily expenses, can afford to spend two years being trained for free at a top-tier firm. A graduate from Multan or Turbat, or from a household with no such cushion, effectively cannot. Since access to the most prestigious firms is widely understood to run through personal connections and informal referrals rather than open, merit-based recruitment, the unpaid pupillage system quietly filters out precisely those graduates for whom a legal career could be most transformative. What is marketed as a meritocratic apprenticeship is, in practice, a wealth test dressed up as professional training.

Female interns face a related but distinct set of risks. The relative informality of chamber culture, combined with the absence of any real institutional oversight of unpaid interns’ working conditions, leaves young women particularly exposed to harassment with limited recourse. The Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act, 2010, and its 2022 amendment, extended coverage to a wider range of workplace relationships, but enforcement inside small chambers as opposed to large corporate firms with formal HR departments remains largely theoretical. An unpaid intern hoping for a reference or a permanent position has every incentive to stay silent.

None of this is to say every senior lawyer who takes on unpaid interns is acting in bad faith; many genuinely believe, as the profession has long insisted, that pupillage is an investment in the intern’s own future. But belief is not evidence, and there is little data testing whether unpaid pupillage produces better lawyers than a modestly paid one would, or whether firms would truly stop training juniors if a stipend were required. Given how heavily law firms already rely on interns for substantive work, it seems more likely that a minimum stipend requirement would simply formalize the value interns already provide.

The fix does not require reinventing the wheel. The Pakistan Bar Council could amend its enrolment rules to require a minimum stipend during pupillage, as some foreign bar associations already do. Firms above a certain size could be required to register interns under the Apprenticeship Ordinance, bringing them within existing protections. And bar councils could extend meaningful, monitored harassment complaint mechanisms to chambers of every size, not just the handful of firms large enough to run their own HR departments.

A profession built on the promise of equal treatment before the law owes its own newest entrants rather more consistency between what it argues in court and how it treats them at their desks.