Hi there! Firstly, I just wanted ask how long does it take you to answer if you keep everything in? Before my interviews I always had this worry about my answers being too long and the people advising me always told me not to worry too much about it - while you will hear a lot about "conversational" interviews (and to the extent possible, it is indeed good to have that), the main purpose of the interview is to offer you a platform for you to speak. In my interviews, my 'why the firm' answer always took me at least 3 full minutes and it was never an issue.
In one case, for a firm I had a lot of reasons, which were well-researched and fitted my experiences, my 'why the firm' answer took almost 10 minutes. I could see the interviewers were really impressed while I was articulating it and I ended up receiving a VS offer before leaving the office. Now, I do not advise you to generally aim for this. Initially, I had prepared a significantly shorter answer, but as I was going through my first point I noticed the partners really liked it when I was going on a deeper level of analysis and from time to time praised my points and added commentary. Thus, I think part of your thinking when determining how long to speak for should be based on your read of the attitude of the interviewers. If you see they seem to get impatient, you might want to shorten your analysis on each reason and maybe drop some points. However, if you see they are interested and engaged, there is no reason to hold back. If you are unsure, you can even check at certain points to see if it is fine to continue - you can say something like "
There are two further reasons for my interest in the firm that I intended to discuss, but just being conscious of time I thought to ask if it is fine to continue or if you would prefer to move on to something else?"
To summarize, I will highlight to main takeaways from my experience:
- If your answer does not take longer than around 3 minutes, there is no reason to shorten it.
- If it is longer than that, you can prepare both a short version of the answer and a longer one, read the attitude of the interviewers, and then make a judgement call on which to use.
As to your question as to what you should cut (assuming you still have a need for that) my somewhat unhelpful answer is that it depends on the firm. The three reasons you mentioned may each be more or less persuasive depending on that. You want to consider both (i) how 'unique' to the firm each reason is - to how many others does it apply to at one level or another?; and (ii) how 'important' it is regarding your experience at the firm as a trainee. I cannot say anything about (i) without knowing which firm you are referring to, but, all other things being equal, for (ii) I would say the third reason you mentioned is the least important. While innovation is certainly something firms are increasingly focused on, the legal industry has generally been quite conservative and risk-averse, so there is a limit as to how much firms are actually willing to do in this regard. More importantly, especially when compared to practice area selection and training, innovation is something I believe trainees are impacted by less often in their day to day life at the firm.
