- Sep 9, 2024
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This is a guide for the purposes of preparing for competency interviews, be they in a VI, another intermediary step or an AC/final stage interview. The advice here is based on my personal approach, as I received VS offers from top US/MC firms 4/4 times I implemented it. This will include:
A. The Step-by-step preparation guide
The essential method and process is the same, though you may want to vary the amount of time you invest in preparation at each step depending on the whether this is a VI, an intermediary or a final stage interview.
Step 1 - Preparing ideas for answers
The first and most difficult step in preparing for interviews is learning how to respond to a wide variety of questions. Of course, you cannot prepare beforehand for all potential variations of all potential interview questions. Furthermore, you do not want to learn answers by heart and then just repeat them in front of the interviewers - they are likely to sound robotic. However, by investing a substantial amount of time thinking about how you would go about answering to as many different questions as possible, you start learning how to describe your motivations and experiences in a flexible manner. This decreases the chances that you will be caught off-guard by any given question. It also increases the chances that, even if you have not prepared for a question you are being asked, you will find a somewhat sensible answer to it.
The first thing I would do when invited to an AC/interview (and for a video interview, but not in the same level of detail) would be to try to build a question bank to practice on. I would create a Word doc with a few big headings (like 'CV based questions’, ‘competency questions'; 'motivations/firm-specific questions', 'commercial awareness questions', situational judgement questions' etc) and firstly write down all the questions I could think of under each relevant heading. I would then look at my CV and find try to think of how I could leverage my experience to answer those questions. Finally, I would write 2-3 short bullet points answers under each question - I have found this helps with memorizing the ideas for your answers. This enabled me to (i) have the ideas ready to go in my mind for a high number of questions and (ii) to still sound natural as I had to go through the though process of formulating an answer in the actual interview (as I would not memorize a particular way to articular the ideas I noted down). It is also worth mentioning that at this step I would prepare particularly well for the questions I thought were very likely to come up (such as Why commercial law, Why the firm, Why me etc).
The second part of my preparation at this step involved searching for interview question banks on the internet - such as the one offered by TCLA here. While reading them, I would spend around 30 seconds on each question thinking of potential ways of answering them. I would then copy the questions I was having particular difficulty with and add them under the relevant heading in my word document. After finalizing this process, I would once again look at my CV and spend a longer amount of time thinking how to best answer each of them. Then, I would note down my ideas in short bullet points.
The final part was similar to the second, with the only difference being that I would search directly for examples of past questions asked by the firm I was interviewing at - resources that were useful were this TCLA forum and Glassdoor.
Step 2 - Practicing articulating your answers
Once I had found the right ideas as to how to answer most interview questions, the second step of preparation involved improving my ability to articulate them. Despite the initial awkwardness of this method, I have found it incredibly useful to simply turn my laptop's camera on, pick one question at random, give myself a few seconds to think, and then record my answer. Subsequently, I would watch the recording with as critical an attitude as possible to see the parts I was struggling with the most. Then I would repeat this process again and again until I was happy with the way I was answering a given question.
A point worth noting is that as I was deciding at random which question to respond to, I would try to tweak the specific phrasing of the question in my mind. Thus, instead of just learning how to answer 'Why do you want to pursue a career in commercial law?', I would learn to answer many variations of the same type of question, such as 'How did your interest in commercial law originate?', 'Why commercial law rather than another area of the law?', 'Why do you want to be a commercial solicitor rather than a commercial barrister?' and so on. Once again, by following this approach, I would learn how to be flexible in formulating my ideas to best suit the exact question the interviewer would be asking me.
Step 3 - Mock interviews
Especially for any AC/final stage interviews, mock interviews are an incredibly useful preparation tool. After you have improved your interview skills as much as you could by firstly preparing your best ideas for answers, and then preparing the best way to articulate them, you should now seek to further improve both your ideas and your capacity to communicate them by getting feedback from others. Hence, if you can find someone with VS/TC interview experience (or even just experience with commercial law/interviews in general), it would be helpful to get them to do a mock interview for you.
Moreover, getting more familiar with the 'interview experience' beforehand contributes a lot to your ability to calm your nerves and do your best on the big day. As such, I would advise you to reach out to people who could help you with this, even if they are not part of your immediate circle. You will be surprised how many people will be willing to help you out!
Step 4 - Getting into the right mindset
Finally, although this may sound a bit cliche, try to go into the interview with a positive attitude. Remind yourself that just by reaching this stage, you have demonstrated to be an exceptionally competitive candidate. Acknowledge the fact that since the firm chose to meet you out of so many other applicants, it means you have everything you need to succeed - whether that means success with this firm or another.
Finally, although I appreciate how hard it may be, try to not put an excessive amount of pressure on yourself. Meditate on your journey and how far you've come and accept that as long as you do your best, you will have nothing to blame yourself for. Going through these thought processes the night and morning before the interviews helped me a lot with reducing my anxiety and my improved my ability to show a composed yet enthusiastic attitude.
B. Additional advice for VIs
Although they do differ on a firm-by-firm basis, VI questions tend on the most part to be more formulaic and predictable than at final stage interviews. This is a factor that is worth taking into consideration when considering how to prepare. The questions that come up in VIs tend to be in one of the following categories:
C) Additional advice for final stage interviews:
The first pointer for more specific final stage interview preparation is about further researching the firm. At a final stage interview, you should expect a lot of scrutiny and sometimes pushback on your motivations for why the firm and your understanding of its operations. As such, you should invest time into refreshing and then researching the firm a lot more than you did for the purpose of the written application.
In terms of areas that you should focus on with the further research, I would include the following:
- A general step-by-step preparation guide
- Specific advice on preparing for VIs
- Specific advice on preparing for final stage competency interviews
A. The Step-by-step preparation guide
The essential method and process is the same, though you may want to vary the amount of time you invest in preparation at each step depending on the whether this is a VI, an intermediary or a final stage interview.
Step 1 - Preparing ideas for answers
The first and most difficult step in preparing for interviews is learning how to respond to a wide variety of questions. Of course, you cannot prepare beforehand for all potential variations of all potential interview questions. Furthermore, you do not want to learn answers by heart and then just repeat them in front of the interviewers - they are likely to sound robotic. However, by investing a substantial amount of time thinking about how you would go about answering to as many different questions as possible, you start learning how to describe your motivations and experiences in a flexible manner. This decreases the chances that you will be caught off-guard by any given question. It also increases the chances that, even if you have not prepared for a question you are being asked, you will find a somewhat sensible answer to it.
The first thing I would do when invited to an AC/interview (and for a video interview, but not in the same level of detail) would be to try to build a question bank to practice on. I would create a Word doc with a few big headings (like 'CV based questions’, ‘competency questions'; 'motivations/firm-specific questions', 'commercial awareness questions', situational judgement questions' etc) and firstly write down all the questions I could think of under each relevant heading. I would then look at my CV and find try to think of how I could leverage my experience to answer those questions. Finally, I would write 2-3 short bullet points answers under each question - I have found this helps with memorizing the ideas for your answers. This enabled me to (i) have the ideas ready to go in my mind for a high number of questions and (ii) to still sound natural as I had to go through the though process of formulating an answer in the actual interview (as I would not memorize a particular way to articular the ideas I noted down). It is also worth mentioning that at this step I would prepare particularly well for the questions I thought were very likely to come up (such as Why commercial law, Why the firm, Why me etc).
The second part of my preparation at this step involved searching for interview question banks on the internet - such as the one offered by TCLA here. While reading them, I would spend around 30 seconds on each question thinking of potential ways of answering them. I would then copy the questions I was having particular difficulty with and add them under the relevant heading in my word document. After finalizing this process, I would once again look at my CV and spend a longer amount of time thinking how to best answer each of them. Then, I would note down my ideas in short bullet points.
The final part was similar to the second, with the only difference being that I would search directly for examples of past questions asked by the firm I was interviewing at - resources that were useful were this TCLA forum and Glassdoor.
Step 2 - Practicing articulating your answers
Once I had found the right ideas as to how to answer most interview questions, the second step of preparation involved improving my ability to articulate them. Despite the initial awkwardness of this method, I have found it incredibly useful to simply turn my laptop's camera on, pick one question at random, give myself a few seconds to think, and then record my answer. Subsequently, I would watch the recording with as critical an attitude as possible to see the parts I was struggling with the most. Then I would repeat this process again and again until I was happy with the way I was answering a given question.
A point worth noting is that as I was deciding at random which question to respond to, I would try to tweak the specific phrasing of the question in my mind. Thus, instead of just learning how to answer 'Why do you want to pursue a career in commercial law?', I would learn to answer many variations of the same type of question, such as 'How did your interest in commercial law originate?', 'Why commercial law rather than another area of the law?', 'Why do you want to be a commercial solicitor rather than a commercial barrister?' and so on. Once again, by following this approach, I would learn how to be flexible in formulating my ideas to best suit the exact question the interviewer would be asking me.
Step 3 - Mock interviews
Especially for any AC/final stage interviews, mock interviews are an incredibly useful preparation tool. After you have improved your interview skills as much as you could by firstly preparing your best ideas for answers, and then preparing the best way to articulate them, you should now seek to further improve both your ideas and your capacity to communicate them by getting feedback from others. Hence, if you can find someone with VS/TC interview experience (or even just experience with commercial law/interviews in general), it would be helpful to get them to do a mock interview for you.
Moreover, getting more familiar with the 'interview experience' beforehand contributes a lot to your ability to calm your nerves and do your best on the big day. As such, I would advise you to reach out to people who could help you with this, even if they are not part of your immediate circle. You will be surprised how many people will be willing to help you out!
Step 4 - Getting into the right mindset
Finally, although this may sound a bit cliche, try to go into the interview with a positive attitude. Remind yourself that just by reaching this stage, you have demonstrated to be an exceptionally competitive candidate. Acknowledge the fact that since the firm chose to meet you out of so many other applicants, it means you have everything you need to succeed - whether that means success with this firm or another.
Finally, although I appreciate how hard it may be, try to not put an excessive amount of pressure on yourself. Meditate on your journey and how far you've come and accept that as long as you do your best, you will have nothing to blame yourself for. Going through these thought processes the night and morning before the interviews helped me a lot with reducing my anxiety and my improved my ability to show a composed yet enthusiastic attitude.
B. Additional advice for VIs
Although they do differ on a firm-by-firm basis, VI questions tend on the most part to be more formulaic and predictable than at final stage interviews. This is a factor that is worth taking into consideration when considering how to prepare. The questions that come up in VIs tend to be in one of the following categories:
- The classics: Why you, Why the firm, Why commercial law - these almost always feature in one form or another. Make sure to have a very well-prepared answer.
- Further motivational questions: Why did you initially decide to study law, What other careers did you consider, What do you like and dislike about different types of work, what practice areas/sectors are you interested in etc.
- Competency questions: Tell me about a time you demonstrated teamwork skills/time-management/innovation/creative thinking/integrity etc.
- Situational judgement questions: What would you do in X scenario (eg. you have multiple competing deadlines and you feel your work product will suffer as a result).
- General commercial awareness question: tell us about a news story you have been following and what are its impacts on the economy/the legal market/the firm/the firm's clients, what is a business you admire, who are the firm's competitors? why do the firm's clients keep coming back to the firm?
- Curveballs: Besides variations of these types of questions, the only other type of question you should prepare for is potential curveballs. However, you can't really predict a curveball, so the only thing you can do it to try to train yourself to think quickly and be flexible in how you leverage your experience. To prepare, search for curveball interview question banks, pick questions at random and do your best to try to come up with sensible answers.
- One of the biggest issues most candidates face is being flexible with their pre-prepared answers around the specific time limit of each VI. Try to get to a point where you can, on the spot, answer both the independent questions and the broader combinations of questions in 1 minute, 1.5 minute, and 2-minute timeframes. Then record yourself and assess your performance. The more you do this, the more will you improve your ability to answer different variations of questions in varying timeframes.
- Do not overcommit when you first start answering a question. This was by far the biggest issue for me last year. I would try to be structured and signpost, so I would start my answer by saying 'I will give you three/four reasons why ...'. However, midway through articulating my answer I would realise I did not have enough time to comprehensively state what I indented to. Thus, I would have to either sacrifice on the quality of my explanations, or just not talk through everything I said I would, neither of which is a good look. As such, when in doubt, go for less rather than more. Your purpose should not be to blow away the recruiters, but to simply communicate good substantive points in a clear, concise, and composed manner.
C) Additional advice for final stage interviews:
The first pointer for more specific final stage interview preparation is about further researching the firm. At a final stage interview, you should expect a lot of scrutiny and sometimes pushback on your motivations for why the firm and your understanding of its operations. As such, you should invest time into refreshing and then researching the firm a lot more than you did for the purpose of the written application.
In terms of areas that you should focus on with the further research, I would include the following:
- The basic facts: these include some important pieces of information that you should simply know about the firm, as they can easily come up at one point or another in a final interview. This includes the firm’s London practice areas, spread of international offices, global practice area/sector reputation, core clients, financial results, history in the City and international expansion, any announced strategy changes etc.
- Facts around your motivations for why the firm: research to find out if the unique selling points (USPs) you have identified in your written application are actually truly unique, or it they apply (at least to a certain extent) to other firms as well. If they do, look for ways to further individualize the firm in that regard. You should also just look for any recent news or developments related to those USPs. Moreover, consider whether the personal substantive interests you have linked with the firm’s USPs can withstand scrutiny, and the degree to which any of your experiences support this. Anticipate follow-up questions and pushback and prepare for this.
- General firm-related news: essentially, you want to be informed around any important events that may be of relevance to your understanding of the firm. These include any big new deal/cases that the firm has recently advised, any big clients it has won, top partners poached from rival firms (whether here or in other important jurisdictions), partners the firm lost to its rivals, legal press awards/rankings, financial performance of different practice areas.
- CV-based questions: the general advice here is to be prepared to explain and answer follow-ups about any experience or achievement you have written on your CV, even if you have not referred to it in your application or interview. This applies to experiences in the more distant past as well – around half of one of my VS interviews was based around two non-law related competitions I participated in when still in high school.
- Academic-focused questions: your interviewer will expect you to know your academic pathway well and to be highly reflective about it. Be prepared to talk about your GCSE performance, reasons behind your A-levels subject choices and performance, reasons for your university degree choice and module choices, and an explanation of your performance and general experience in individual modules and in the degree in general.
- Applications strategy: you should be able to explain to the interviewer what other firms you have applied for and lay out a cogent application strategy. The reasons behind your application to other firms should (to the greatest possible extent) also apply to the specific firm you are interviewing with. To the extent they do not apply to the chosen firm, you should be able to explain why your ‘why this firm’ reasons trump the ‘why the other firms’ reasons.
- Practice areas understanding: your interviewer will expect you to understand the operations and basic features of the firm’s most important practice areas. You should understand what exactly the legal service is that a particular practice provides, how it differs from services provided by the other practices, why do the clients need it, who the main clients in the space are, and what the usual tasks are at each level of seniority (trainee, junior associate, senior associate, partner).
- Legal market knowledge: while very detailed knowledge of the legal market is not necessarily expected, it is definitely desirable, and you will get bonus points if you are able to show it off. Regardless, you should still be able to place the firm in the context of the competition in three main ways: (i) know which are the most similar firms to the one you are interviewing with in terms of general features – what ‘type’ of firm it is, and how does it differ from the other ‘types’?; (ii) know who the firms toughest competitors are in each of its main practice areas – who else is a market leader?; (iii) are there any significant shifts happening in the market? Even if not directly related to the firm, moves like Pau, Weiss’ unprecedented London expansion, Allen & Overy’s merger with Shearman Sterling, Latham & Watkins’ string of exists, Slaughter and May’s problems with the ‘best friends’ model, and Freshfields’ US expansion and recent rebrand are all big changes which change the dynamics of the legal market and that you should therefore be aware of.
