We’ve had lots of interns. We’ve had college students working as marketing assistants, administrative assistants, legal assistants, etc. We’ve had law students helping out on cases. Most have worked for free in exchange for the experience. Some have been paid. I think most of them have felt pretty good about their time with us. Some have gone on to law school and others have parlayed their experience in our office into great positions elsewhere. Some have joined us full-time after graduation.

We have, in the past, taken on five or six interns at a time. They kept coming and we kept bringing them in. Free labor, fun people and a ton of energy – what’s not to like?

About a year ago, however, we decided to shift gears and reel in the program. Mostly, I wanted to experiment a bit and see if we could figure out if the intern program was truly a good thing for us.

We scaled back from a bunch of interns to three. Now we’re scaling back to just one.

We’ve learned some things.

First, we learned that it takes more time than we imagined to manage the interns. This is a huge time suck. Their work needs to be coordinated. They need clear assignments and reporting structures. But more significantly, they are people and people come to the business with “issues.” They have personality conflicts, they get upset about things, they come to their manager for advice about issues at school. They have full-time issues but a part-time schedule.

Second, it’s very difficult to measure the economic impact of interns. Much of what they do is stuff that might otherwise have gone undone (without any significant consequences).

Third, it costs a small fortune to deal with their technology needs. Supporting their computer and phone issues is pretty similar, from a time and expense standpoint, to supporting a full-time employee.

Finally, there are other hidden costs involved. For instance, we reimburse for mileage and other expenses. Payments need to be arranged and transmitted. It’s not the dollars involved in the reimbursement, it’s the overhead of processing the payments. Beyond that, management discussions need to be held to figure out who gets an intern and who doesn’t and then there are the ensuing conversations need to be held when someone feels slighted. Letters of recommendation need to be written. Parting gifts need to be purchased. All of these things consume dollars and management time.

Going forward we’ll continue to have interns. But, we’ll do it with more thought and more understanding of the pros and cons of having them on the team.