Hi
@ap_88 . From my experience sitting the written exercise, I think the crucial test here is time-management. You'll be given some documents and be tasked with answering some client's questions. You will then have approx 1 hour to digest the information from the documents and pick out/summarise those parts that are relevant to the client’s questions. Some of the documents will be graphs, so taking your time to really understand these graphs despite the time limit for the exercise will be important.
The partner interview is split between the article and CV/interesting matters. The first question they’ll ask is for you to summarise the article in 2 sentences, so use your 15 mins to plan this. You should also try to form an opinion on the article to help with the discussion. Whilst not essential, I found that looking at the article and finding ways of relating this to other relevant topics/similar cases I might have read up on helped in guiding the discussion and in showing my wider reading around the subject. Given the article will likely be an opinion piece from the FT/Guardian/Times, reading the news in the lead up of your interview will really help.
The rest of the interview covers your CV/random interesting matters. This is quite unpredictable, but one semi-predictable question would be whether there is a particular deal you’ve been following recently – so I’d recommend doing research on a deal in advance of your interview and thinking about what’s interesting about it both commercially and legally. One warning would be to avoid bringing anything that you don’t know that well, just in case you are then asked some challenging follow-up questions.
The HR interview is nothing to worry about. It is generally chatty and you might be asked questions such as Why
Slaughter and May and why commercial law. You can actually use this interview tactically if you anything does go wrong as they’ll (likely) ask you how the day has gone/exercise went. I had messed up my time management so I said in the HR interview that what I’d done was purposeful; i.e. “I’d rather highlight two key points than overload the client with information”.
