We know enough to say that JSA has a different take on recruitments than other Tier 1 firms. JSA doesn't recruit from college Day Zs, has multiple (even three) callbacks, sometimes requires long term (3+ months) internships, hires some A0s as junior associates. What exactly is the model that JSA follows? I have noticed that it is often college-based as well, but what generally is JSA's approach towards PPOs?

As a law student, I was hoping to get some clarity regarding this since JSA is a place I'd like to potentially work at!

JSA's Mumbai office follows (or rather used to follow) this approach generally: First they'll offer you a 4-week internship. At the end of your internship, you prepare a worksheet where you write the name of the attorneys you've worked with and the work that you've done for each of them and submit this to HR. HR circulates this sheet to the attorneys to get their feedback on your work. If it's good, you get a callback for a second internship, which could be anywhere between 1-3 months depending on your college's vacations. At the end of this second internship as well, you fill the worksheet and the attorneys review your work. If the feedback is good after the second internship as well (which is quite common), you get the offer.

This is the ideal way this ideally happens as per the firm's HR. However, the Mumbai office is notoriously known for offering long term round-the-year internships to 3rd-4th year students from local colleges that don't have strict attendance rules, and not making them offers until the time they are taking a break for their final semester exams, and sometimes not then either. Though this is not too common, but there are one or two cases every year where an intern who has been interning with the firm for 1-2 years is told that there are no vacancies in the team right at the time when he/she asks for the offer before going on a break for the final exams.

Also, I don't know how much the approach towards internship evaluation has changed since the pandemic started. I interned there for a couple of months last year (March-April), and when the internship ended, we were told by the HR that our worksheets would be shared with the attorneys for evaluation as soon as the office reopened. Afaik, none of the 8-10 of us got a callback, though some got emails from the attorneys that they had worked with saying that they would recommend the intern for a second internship if he/she was interested to intern again.

JSA (Bombay, at least) has a really poor internship programme where they take a lot of interns with little to no intention of offering any recruitment opportunities. They will cite some dated Vahura survey to say that they have the best working culture but it is quite toxic. As an intern, there is little to no interaction with seniors in the team with most work being given by juniormost associates and not even senior associates. They say they don't have any team allocation and that makes things worse - you end up getting assignments from multiple teams and end up having a lot of work lined up - resulting in you having to work late into the night very often. They also offer/give away extensions and call backs with no intention of hiring (and solely to avail cheap labor maybe?) They even cut down their usual stipend of 7.2K to 6K for virtual interns (who had to work much harder because of a general decrease in the number of interns).

My recommendation - treat it as a stepping stone and don't do jsa unless you have anything else lined up. Never waste your time on an extension/callback.

Permanent Intern likely means that you have already graduated from law school, just not a NLU.

It's neither a traineeship nor a offer of employment. This is a way to get cheap labour from NON-NLU people. Through the whispers I hear something about pedigree. Woof!

JSA is unlikely to make you permanent associate. Hence the term Permanent INTERN.

If you have a job, any job ask JSA to get rekt. If not start here and keep looking.