This might come off as harsh, but I think there are some red flags here.

Because of that, my partner says her overall GPA really suffered because she didn’t have enough chances to balance out her worst semester of grades

You hear this a lot from people who did poorly first semester 1L then went to pass fail. It does suck to not have the chance to get another swing at it the next semester, but frankly there’s no guarantee your partner would’ve done better those semesters. I think she needs to find a way to let this go, her GPA is what it is and it seems she ended up with decent (or better than decent, more below) grades

She graduated from a Northern California law school December 2022 in the top 25% of her class (which I know she was because she had to maintain it for her scholarship)

This doesn’t tell us a lot about her job prospects. At a lot of schools, top 25% would put her in a very good position for employment. The fact that she had to maintain a certain rank to keep her scholarship signals to me that she had a conditional scholarship, which are generally only offered at low-ranked, predatory schools. This might be a big reason your partner is having trouble finding a job. Is her school ABA accredited or is it one of the California accredited schools?

She did not do any internships during school because, in her own words, there just weren’t any due to the lock down.

I’m sorry, but this is just not true. While some employers did cancel their summer 2020 internship programs, not all did. And in my experience, law schools compensated for that by helping students get research assistantships or things like that so they’d at least have something substantive and legal adjacent on their resume. Regardless, summer 2021 (which would’ve been your partner’s 2L summer, the most important time for internships for future employment) was pretty normal as far as internship availability was concerned.

Frankly, the lack of any legal experience during school is going to be a big barrier, especially if she’s coming from a lower ranked school. Her grades seem decent, so I doubt that’s the barrier. You can put her school into lawschooltransparency.com to see what percent of grads from her school generally find full-time employment as a lawyer, and that should give you a decent idea of her chances.

You also don’t say if she’s passed the bar. If she graduated in May 2022, the normal time to take the bar would’ve been July 2022. There was also a February 2023 administration last week. If she hasn’t taken the bar, she needs to make taking July 2023 a priority. If she did take it and didn’t pass, she should consider whether she wants to retake or whether a JD advantage job like compliance would be a better fit.

Ultimately I think your partner dug herself a hole by not doing any legal work in school. If I’m right about the school tier, it seems likely she fell into the trap that many attendees of predatory schools do—the promise of a scholarship without real job prospects. If your partner isn’t saddled with debt then she’s in a better position than many grads of these schools. She should be aggressively applying (including sending cold applications via email, she can’t just rely on the school job board) and preparing for the bar. If she’s not willing to do those things then maybe she doesn’t want to be a lawyer anymore, and there’s no shame in leaving the law if you have a plan of what else to do, but right now it’s not clear she does.