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Working in house my 1l summer with a firm that manages assets purchased by private investments funds. Feel bad because I'm getting paid but not doing a lot of work. I'll ask the in house attorneys for something to do, they will respond saying no problem just watch my e-mail, but I never get sent anything. The General Counsel will call my into his office, outline this project he wants me to work on over summer, tells me to sit tight for an e-mail outlining what I'm suppose to do...I get nothing. I'll politely remind him once the next day, he'll send me a few letters and ask me to fill in the blanks (takes 20 minutes) and well that is it.

I spent most of today poking around the company's files learning about what they do, but was given no work. Like I said I feel bad because I'm not really doing anything and getting paid, but I don't want to be that annoying summer that pesters the attorneys all day.

Is it a formal in-house program, or kind of a one off "lets get an intern to help out" kind of gig? If it's the latter (which it sounds like) I wouldn't worry. I worked in-house last summer and it was that kind of summer job. It seemed like they needed to get comfortable knowing what I could/couldn't do without them holding my hand through everything (and there will be plenty you just naturally can't do as a 1L/Law Student). Once they kinda figured out what I could do, I got plenty of work.

I think the normal advice of "sit tight, do good work when you get it, and be/act interested in the work they throw at you" applies here.

FWIW I'm also in-house at a small company in one of those informal type intern programs and my work was also incredibly slow to start off. What helped is that they dug up a few long term projects for me to do between assignments so I didn't keep coming back to them. Like memos on stuff that isn't pressing but would be good to have around as long there's an intern around to do it.

Maybe you can find a way to politely ask/suggest they give you some type of long-term assignment that you could do between the shorter assignments?

I'm an in-house attorney. Formal or informal intern programs it doesnt matter, it still takes time and energy for us to review your work when we likely can do it quicker and correctly if we just did it ourselves. If your legal departments are like mine, the attorneys are trying to get their work done and go home. No one is really eager to spend extra time reviewing and correcting work they likely could have banged out by themselves earlier in the day instead of giving it to an intern. They are probably trying to find appropriate projects that (1) can teach you something and (2) will not annoyingly burden the supervising attorney. Just sit around and wait patiently. We know you are there. We just have real work to do so we can't constantly attend to your need to have tons of projects. When something crosses our desk that we think is something you can handle and a good teaching experience we will give it to you. And once you start proving yourself we will expand the list of what we feel comfortable giving you. But remember you are a 1L and so by default that list is going to be very small.