Internship Experience @ District and Sessions Judge, Bhubaneswar: I realized it is pretty important to know your basics

Intern Details

Name: Sibadutta Dash

Name of your College: KIIT School Of Law

Year of Study: 2nd Year B.A.LL.B

Duration of the Internship

16th June, 2015 – 31st July, 2015

Name of Organisation, Location

District and Sessions Judge, Bhubaneswar, Odisha.

Application Process

No formal application procedure as such. A relative of mine arranged for a meet and the internship commenced from the same day itself.

Duration of internship and timings 3 weeks. Monday-Friday.

Timings: 10:30 A.M. – 4 P.M. (Including a one hour lunch break)

First impression, first day formalities, infrastructure

District Court, as maybe the case with every district, is a humdrum of busy affairs. Hundreds of advocates, parties to suits, relatives of parties to suit, and the like, flocked the entire two floor building.

There is no such formal set up for an intern there.

You attend the court hearings and basing on the person under whom you’re interning, you get to have your own set of work.

The Court was divided into a number of smaller courts and almost each court had a few interns at that point of time.

Main tasks

Well, main task was just to attend court proceedings. In other words, just sit. You may choose to make notes if only you understand the lingo of that advocate arguing in front of you.

Apart from the Sessions Judge court, it is the local language that prevails all over the other courts. It can be fun if you have your friends interning with you.

Work environment and people

You generally don’t get to interact with people. After all, what would you talk in the first place?

Everyone out there is as busy as a bee! Ironically, work environment could be as simple as it could be. No one to bother your presence at the court, in that way I mean.

Stipend

None.

Biggest Lessons

For me, the ostensible idea of not interning at an NGO in your first year and rather at a District Court, was an utter failure since I had no clue about the procedural aspect followed in the lower courts.

And I realized, it is pretty important to know your basics, and here I mean to have a fair idea of the procedural codes, to intern at a District Court. Or else, it shall merely be a fun three week experience since you see the first step of the law in action!

Any Other Thing

You may well choose to intern under some advocate at the Sessions Court, than the judge. Because the judge gets pretty occupied, but the advocate might bring you to action just as he himself could be in!

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This entry has been submitted for the LexisNexis-Lawctopus Internship Experience Writing Competition 2015-2016. iPleaders is the learning partner for this competition.