TCLA Vacation Scheme Applications Discussion Thread 2024-25

cwhite233

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Dec 26, 2020
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Anyone have advice for phone interview with Morgan Lewis?
Very relaxed and standard motivational and competency and situational questions, so good prep bullet point examples of when you have used certain skills or encountered certain scenarios (eg working with a difficult person, under time pressure, etc). Nothing commercial from what I remember.
 

MaryAra299

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Feb 2, 2025
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I'm feeling nervous with people asking for CRS VI tips, but they didn't apply to the same location as me (the ones I saw all said Guildford office), so I suppose no news is... well... not GOOD news, exactly, but at this point in time, probably not BAD news either.

CRS is my top firm (joint with Michelmores) so I'll definitely post the moment I hear anything (PFO or otherwise!). Good luck to you:)
Which location did you apply to? I applied to CRS London
 

Andrei Radu

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Sep 9, 2024
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I have a 30 min virtual interview with Cooley next week. This is my first interview with a corporate law firm so any advice would be appreciated!
Hi @corporatelore and huge congrats on your interview, it is a big achievement! I will link bellow some useful posts and resources for interview preparation, I hope they help :)! I will also tag @Ram Sabaratnam - he will likely be able to give you more pinpointed advice as he is a future trainee at the firm.
  • First, take a look at this TCLA post summarizing another candidate's interview experience with Cooley - this will be useful to get an idea as to what to expect;
  • See my recent Complete Competency Interviews Guide - it describes in detail my step-by-step interview preparation approach (which led to a VS offers 4/4 times I implemented it) and summarizes my top tips.
  • See my recent post on how to manage nerves and anxiety during the actual interview:
My top tip would be to focus on doing well and not on being perfect. Many people go to ACs thinking they need to blow away the partners and the recruiters to succeed, but I think this is the wrong attitude to have. First of all, while your achievements and skills might be impressive for this stage, it is quite unlikely you will manage to overly impress anyone no matter how hard you try - you will know a lot less about any given commercial law subject than lawyer in the firm. Secondly, this attitude will make you feel even more stressed than you would normally be and will therefore likely impact your performance. If you will be assessed for a total time of a few hours, it is impossible to be perfect in every moment. When you notice an imperfection in an answer, the right reaction is to acknowledge it but then to move past it and make the best of the rest. Instead, the overly perfectionistic candidates tend to stress about it a lot more than they should, and in attempting to fix the initial mistake they do a lot more harm to their progression chances. People with this mindset thus often end up creating negative feedback loops for themselves: they make a small error, then they begin overthinking it, which decreases their self-confidence, which impacts their next answer, which in turn further intensifies their anxiety; a series of events which can end up completely derailing one's performance.

To avoid this, instead of aiming to excel everywhere, I would simply aim to perform well - to do a good job on every task and score well on every relevant assessment criterion. This boils down to using your preparation to make decent substantive points and communicate them in a clear and confident manner. If you manage to do this you will have performed better than the majority of candidates and in most cases should be enough to get you progressed - it did for me 4/4 times. If you reframe your task in this way, I think you should feel a lot less anxious about it: while perhaps it is difficult to convince yourself that you will pull of an extraordinary performance, you should feel a lot more confident in being able to respond sensibly to tasks and to cover all your bases well.

A final piece of advice I have for calming down on the day and to avoid blanking out is to take your time:
  1. Firstly, taking your time before starting your answer. Instead of just jumping into a response the instance the interviewer stops speaking (which is a very natural temptation) take 3-4 seconds to think about and structure your answer. This will significantly decrease the number of times you find yourself blanking out mid-answer or having difficulty finding the right way to end a sentence.
  2. Secondly, if you have difficulty with finding sensible points for a question, it is perfectly acceptable to request some thinking time - just say 'May I please take a minute to consider my answer?'. In the unlikely case you do not find anything after that, explain that you are unsure what to say; but also walk the interviewer through your thought process of your best guess.
  3. Thirdly, aim to speak more slowly. When you are anxious, your hear rate goes up and you naturally start speaking at a higher pace, which is problematic in that this simply means taking less time to think as you answer. This naturally reduces how articulate and confident you seem, especially since speaking quickly more often leads you to losing your chain of thought or expressing yourself in unclear language. As such, try to slow down. Also, use strategic 2-3 second pauses in your speech to add emphasis to points and to get valuable thinking time as you are moving between the different parts of your answer.
Finally, know that just by getting to the AC you have proven yourself to be one of the very best candidates out of a huge pool, which means you have all it takes to succeed! Best of luck :)!
 
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Jessica Booker

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Aug 1, 2019
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This may be a silly question but with spring/summer vac schemes, how does giving out TC offers work? Would a firm allocate 50% to each so as not to disadvantage the later scheme or would they make all their TC offers after the final summer scheme (even for those who had a spring scheme)? Thank you!
It wouldn’t be as stringent/rigid as 50% - there would be some flexibility, especially as not everyone will accept their offers and some candidates ask for deferred offers too.

They may also operate a hold list rather than having a straight reject/offer process too.

Some firms also choose not to offer spring candidates until the summer scheme has finished, so really depends on the firm’s approach.

Firms can also offer earlier or later intakes dates if needed too.
 
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Hi everyone! I’m new to the forum… I still haven’t heard back from the following firms:

Morgan Lewis
Paul Weiss
Latham & Watkins
Gibson
Millbank
Jones Day
Davis Polk
Dechert
Debevoise
Ropes and grey
Morrison Foerster
Case and white (after video interview)
Freshfields

Does anyone have an inkling if this is basically the end of the road for me? Surely Davis Polk, for example, is not going to advance me to the next round after all these months. I’d love any and all kind of input.

Thanks
 

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