When KPMG Avocats announced this month that it had recruited a 10-lawyer IP/IT team from a rival firm, it included two law-graduate interns who were in the middle of a six-month training stint.

"Of course we brought the interns over," said Moustapha Oussedrat, president of KPMG Avocats. "Interns are full players on the team. The current situation does nothing to change that."

As the COVID-19 crisis led law firms in the U.S. to put their summer associate programs on ice or vastly shorten them for cost or logistical reasons—or both—firms in France simply moved their equivalent internship programs, an essential part of legal education, online.

The firms say they are planning to continue the programs, called "stages," in French, through the year, with some minor adjustments.

The effort is not without its challenges—notably, how to integrate student lawyers into law firm life when almost everyone is working from home, and making sure interns have meaningful work to do amid the downturn.

But whether to maintain the programs was never in question, lawyers said.

"These are our future colleagues," said Cécile Zoro, an employment law counsel at Clifford Chance in Paris. "We all have an interest in making sure they have the best possible experience—whether they join our firm, as hopefully they will, or not."

The Ordre des Avocats issued guidance at the beginning of the lockdown in mid-March that law firms should make every effort to maintain their internship programs, which, the standards body reminded firms, were "an indispensable part of legal training."

This emphasis on education rather than pure recruitment helps distinguish French legal internships from their U.S. counterparts.

Another distinguishing feature of French internships is their modest pay—legal interns earn between €1,000 and €2,000 ($1,100-$2,200) per month—and restrained social calendar.

"People are friendly, and we have after-work drinks, though now we have them by Zoom," said Anne-Sophie Laird, a graduate intern who will complete her bar course in June who works on Zoro's team at Clifford Chance. "But this isn't vacation. It's work. And that's fine."

France has two levels of legal internship. The one that is the most analogous to the summer associate program in the U.S. is run by the Ecole de Formation du Barreau, or Bar Training School, for law school graduates enrolled in the obligatory, 18-month bar course before becoming qualified to practice.

These graduate lawyers do at least one and sometimes two placements of six months each during the course. They join a practice team and perform work similar to a junior associate at a Big Law firm.

"This is the most important phase of a legal education," said Vincent Brenot, a public, regulatory and environmental law partner who supervises the internship program at the elite French firm August Debouzy.

Interns from the bar course who joined firms in January are staying through June as planned. They switched to working remotely with the rest of the firm in mid-March and potentially might come back to the office, now that those restrictions have been somewhat relaxed.

"It helped a lot to have been working face-to-face with people at the beginning," said Julien Dhermand, a graduate intern at Willkie Farr & Gallagher in Paris, who will complete his bar course in June. "It has made maintaining the connection and doing the work remotely much easier."

A new crop of graduate interns is due to arrive in July and, so far, COVID-19 has not changed those plans, law firm managers said.

"I fully expect to have new faces to learn," said Thomas Tollet, a human resources manager at Clifford Chance who runs the firm's internship programs.

The second level of internship is for law school students, who do at least one and often several work experience placements, typically of three months each, during their student years.

Many law firms, including KPMG, said they were keeping these undergraduate programs going through the crisis as part of their contribution to legal education.

Some firms, such as Paul Hastings, have arranged with other firms to keep their undergraduate interns in place past April, rather than have them switch firms during the lockdown.

"These internships aren't so much about the work—the interns aren't qualified lawyers, so there's a limit to what they can do—but about the experience," said Olivier Vermeulen, Paul Hastings' managing partner in Paris.  "It's much easier to give someone a good experience who has worked face-to-face in the firm, rather than having them start when everyone is working at a distance."