Hey
@Amakaa ,
Very well done on getting to both stages. My tips are more on soft skills.
For the telephone interview, I recommend knowing your competencies very well and avoid preparing too heavily on verbatim answers. This is because you want your answers to sound very natural. The best way to do this is to know your passions for commercial law and Akin well, such that any question you’re asked would not necessarily trip you off.
For the AC with RS, perhaps I’ll be able to provide more guidance on that once they inform you what the AC is comprised of.
My general few interview tips are as follows;
- Smile and be confident. At the end of the day, law firms are not just hiring for lawyers, they are hiring for people.
- Keep building your commercial awareness up until then. As you would have heard many times, this is a skill that needs constant developing. You do not need to spend hundreds of hours every week doing this as that would even be counter-effective. Take little strides every day to learn something knew. It would amaze you how those little industry trends or buzz words would be weaved into your interview by you, without you even knowing it. You want your commercial awareness journey to be a natural one, not a forced one as this is what would help out more through the process and beyond.
- With regards what you can ask GR, provided you have any questions on the specifics of the stage or are not clear about anything, GR would be the best to speak to. Don’t hesitate to reach out when in doubt.
- With regards what to ask Partners, don’t ask questions just for the sake of it as most times such questions tend to be those you can easily get by deep-diving into the firm‘s website. The best questions at the end of interviews are those which talk about a topic discussed in the interview itself, or an area of your interviewers specialisation you want to learn more about and why.
Hope this helps, and best of luck!