Applications for Fall 2025 internships are due June 30, 2025. Applications will be evaluated as they are received. You are encouraged to apply early, as we will extend offers on a rolling basis.

EFF’s legal internships provide law students with a unique opportunity to develop valuable skills and real-world experience while working with a nationally recognized public interest law firm. Legal interns learn from and assist EFF’s staff attorneys in all aspects of litigation—including legal research, factual investigation, and drafting of memoranda and briefs—while also helping with policy research, client counseling, and the development of public education materials. Interns attend internal legal team and working group meetings, participate in legal trainings, and may have the opportunity to attend client meetings and court hearings. EFF’s docket ranges across the technological and legal landscape, from online fair use of copyrighted materials to illegal government spying; take a look at http://www.eff.org/cases/ and https://www.eff.org/work for details about our work preserving constitutional values in the digital world.

Academic-year internships last one semester. Interns must work at 20 hours per week for a minimum of 10 weeks. Interns will be required to work from EFF’s San Francisco office at least one day per week. Applicants are advised that EFF attorneys primarily work in-office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For scheduling purposes, EFF encourages all interns to work in-office on Thursdays if possible. Reasonable accommodations will be considered for anyone with a disability that makes in-person work a hardship.

All internships are unpaid; arrangements should be made with the student’s law school for work-study stipends or course credit. In recent years, EFF has been able to offer some limited stipends to interns who exhaust other sources of funding and will not receive course credit. Students who receive outside funding may be eligible for a partial stipend to bring their total funding up to the level of EFF’s stipend amount for that term, if applicable.

Qualifications

• Enrollment at, or recent graduation from, a U.S. law school - law students of all levels, including LLM students, are encouraged to apply
• Demonstrated interest in and enthusiasm for civil liberties or technology-related legal issues
• Excellent research and writing skills
• The initiative and energy to see projects to completion in a fast-moving environment

Application Requirements & Instructions
Your application must include the following components:

• A resume in PDF format
• A cover letter, contact information for two references, and a writing sample, uploaded as a single PDF
  • Your cover letter should explain why you want to work with EFF and why we should want to work with you. Your cover letter should also identify an issue EFF has worked on in the past 5 years that you would be especially interested in working on, and tell us why.
  • Your writing sample should be 10 pages or fewer. Writing samples on civil liberties and/or intellectual property issues are highly preferred, as are litigation-oriented or otherwise persuasive writing samples.