How Do You Draft an Intern Agreement with AI?

Summer starts in three weeks and somebody has already said yes to an intern. You draft an intern agreement with AI by using a clause-assembly drafter, not a general chatbot: you answer a short set of plain questions about the dates, the hours, the duties and the pay, and the assistant selects the matching England and Wales clauses from a maintained library and fills in the blanks. A complete fixed-term draft takes a couple of minutes. This article is general information about English law and 99 Data Rooms, not legal advice.

What an intern agreement is, and when a small business needs one

An intern agreement is a short, fixed-term engagement document. It records who the intern is, when the placement starts and finishes, what they will actually be doing, how many hours they will work, what they will be paid and how, and what happens to confidential information and to anything they produce. It is not a lesser document than an employment contract; it is a narrower one, written for an arrangement that has an end date built in.

A small business needs one every time it brings somebody in on a placement: a startup taking a student over the summer, an agency running a graduate scheme. There is a second reason to write it down here. The word "intern" is a label, not a legal status in England and Wales. Whether the person must be paid turns on what they actually do rather than what you call them, and a written agreement is where you make that position explicit rather than leaving it to be argued about later.

The status question, and why it drives the clauses

Broadly, someone who has to turn up and do real work, rather than shadowing and observing, is likely to be a worker, and workers in England and Wales are generally entitled to at least the National Minimum Wage for their age and to accrue paid statutory holiday under the Working Time Regulations 1998. That is the position as at September 2026, and it is why the honest default for a working internship is a paid, fixed-term agreement. The rates themselves and the holiday calculation are set nationally and change, so check the current figures on gov.uk rather than relying on a number written into any template, this article included. The worker-status distinction is worth working through properly before you decide the internship is unpaid.

There are genuinely narrower categories, for example some student placements that form a required part of a course, and voluntary work for certain kinds of organisation. Status is fact-sensitive, so a borderline arrangement is worth checking with an adviser rather than assumed into whichever answer is cheaper. The practical risk of getting it wrong is not abstract: an employer who treats a worker-status intern as unpaid can face minimum wage enforcement and a claim for arrears, long after the placement has ended.

Which clauses actually matter

Start with the frame of the engagement: the parties, the start and end dates, and the fact that this is a fixed term rather than an open-ended job. Then the substance of the placement: the role, the duties, the hours and the pattern of work, who supervises, and what the intern can expect to learn. Describing the duties honestly matters more here than in most contracts, because the duties are the evidence of what the arrangement really is.

Then pay and holiday, stated properly rather than left implicit: what the rate is, how it is calculated, when it is paid, and how holiday accrues over a short fixed term. Then the protective clauses. Interns see internal material, so a confidentiality clause belongs here, and because interns produce useful work, an intellectual property clause confirming that work created during the placement belongs to the company is worth having; the underlying law is in our IP assignment guide. Finally, notice: even a fixed term needs a clean way to end early on either side.

If the placement is really a permanent hire in disguise, the right document is an employment agreement instead, and our note on what a UK employment contract must include sets out what changes. If the work is genuinely casual with no fixed pattern, a zero-hours contract may fit better.

The four ways people actually draft this document

The failure mode specific to this document is the free "unpaid internship" template, the most downloaded shape of the document and the one most likely to embed an assumption the law does not support in England and Wales. A chatbot draft has the same problem for a different reason: it predicts likely wording from training data that is heavily American, and US internship norms do not carry across.

How the AI drafter assembles the agreement

AI Legal Drafting in 99 Data Rooms works the opposite way round to a chatbot. It assembles vetted clauses, never invents legal wording; a starting point, not legal advice. Every clause in your draft existed in the library before you asked, assembled from vetted, professionally-maintained open-source clause templates, and the assistant's job is matching those clauses to your answers rather than composing new legal text. The wider case for that distinction is in assembled clauses versus invented ones.

The Intern Agreement sits in the People and Founders group of the template library, one of seventeen England and Wales templates, next to the employment and consultancy agreements. You can open it directly or describe the placement in plain words, something like "eight-week summer internship, four days a week, paid", and the assistant asks the questions that shape it: the intern's name, the dates, the hours, the duties and the pay. It assembles the draft, including the confidentiality and IP clauses, in a couple of minutes.

The drafter starts at Pro, which is £19 a month and includes three drafting documents a month. The Free plan is a genuine tier rather than a trial, three rooms and twenty-five active links, forever, with no card required, but it does not include the drafter or e-signature. The full ladder is on the pricing page.

Getting it signed before the first day

Share the draft with the intern as a tracked, revocable link rather than an attachment, gated behind a verified email and a one-time code from Pro, so you know the right person is opening it. Page-by-page analytics show whether they have read it and how long they spent, which is a fair thing to want for someone signing their first agreement of any kind.

When they are ready, send it for signature in the browser. The intern signs without needing an account, and the executed PDF returns with an audit certificate recording the signer's IP, their intent-to-sign consent, timestamps and a SHA-256 fingerprint. Electronic signatures are admissible for most commercial documents in England and Wales; exceptions include deeds, wills, land transfers and lasting powers of attorney. General information, not legal advice.

What to check before you send it

1. The start and end dates are stated, and the agreement reads as fixed-term rather than open-ended.
2. The duties describe what the intern will really do, because that is what the status question turns on.
3. Pay is stated, and the rate is checked against the current minimum for that age on gov.uk on the day you draft.
4. Holiday accrual over the fixed term is addressed rather than left out because the placement is short.
5. Confidentiality and IP clauses are present, and the IP clause covers work produced during the placement.
6. There is a clean way for either side to end the placement early.

Draft your intern agreement from vetted clauses

Assemble a fair, fixed-term England and Wales intern agreement from vetted clauses, then gate, track and sign it in the same place. The drafter is included from Pro at £19 a month; the free tier gives you three rooms and twenty-five active links, forever, no card, so you can set up the sharing side first (e-signature also starts on Pro). Start for free and have a reviewable draft ready before the placement begins.