TCLA Vacation Scheme Applications Discussion Thread 2024-25
- Thread starter Jessica Booker
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Not sure how I feel about it tbh I have mixed thoughts. I am hoping for the best but also preparing for the worst as well lmao. 🤣
Best of luck to everyone who did the Willkie WE! 🙂
Am I the only one who’s still waiting back from Slaughters and LW? I’ve submitted both of them in beginning of december just a day before their deadline…
- Sep 9, 2024
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Hey @AS24 I definitely am, their scarcity here has really taught me their value 🥲. On this brighter note, I will split up my thoughts between how to organize your time and then your ideas.
Organizing Time
To ensure you are managing your time well, before you start working through the exercise I advise you to take a few minutes to make a plan. First, take a look at the number of tasks and read the prompts. Then, briefly skim the annexed briefs and readings - but only very briefly. You want to see how many pages of readings you will have per task and how dense those look. Based on this information, make an estimation as to how much time each task or part of the exercise will take compared to the others - ie you might see the first task as requiring about twice the workload of the second and that the third is roughly the same as the second. Then, you should spend around 1/2 of your time on the first, around 1/4 on the second and another 1/4 on the third. However, before dividing the time using the relevant fractions, subtract around 10 minutes from the initial total time: 5 to account for the planning part at the beginning and 5 for contingencies and reviewing spelling and grammar at the end. I think this should be your basic approach, but do keep in mind these further considerations:
- You may want to make a further separation between the estimated necessary time to do the reading and the estimated necessary time to write your analysis for each part. One of the most significant issues I have had with written exercises has been giving in to the temptation to take more time than I should reading and taking notes; and simultaneously underestimating the time it would take me to write my analysis. In my experience, the materials in these exercises are not that difficult to work through and do not attempt to trip you up, so they do not require that much time. Thus, it might be a good idea to plan ahead how much you want to take on them: it should help you keep yourself in check during the exercise and not let your anxiety and overthinking make you waste precious time by reading the same passages again and again.
- You may not be able to estimate such a simple fraction split as in my aforementioned example. That is fine, and you definitely should not spend time overthinking this element. Simply go with your gut in making some judgement about the relative workloads and move forward with that. The most important part of this planning is not maximum accuracy in representation of the time each should take, but in providing a rough framework which will enable you to keep yourself to account and thus improve efficiency.
- If your tasks/parts of the exercise have different priority levels you should adjust your time allocation fractions. I would still aim to have a rough representation of what the workload of each involves but I would also allow adjustments to that to ensure a high quality work product for the most important ones.
As for structuring your thoughts, it is unfortunately more difficult to give very concrete advice, as the right way to go about it will be highly dependent on the details of the exercise. My main advice is to find multiple distinctions between the different categories of information that you will be presenting ; and to organize them under multiple headings. The last thing you want is a huge block of text. It will almost always be more difficult to read and understand and will often also end up confusing your analysis as well. To give some examples of how you can go about this:
- Split the descriptive part of your writing (where you are essentially summarizing uncontroversial facts) and the analytic one (where you are advancing your opinion based on the aforementioned facts);
- If your argument is more complex, separate the analysis of the different inferential steps necessary to establish the conclusion;
- Separate the pros considerations, the cons considerations, and the synthesis view;
- Split your analysis of the different alternatives based on the facts;
- Separate your analysis of the relevant considerations based on their class (financial, legal, social, reputational etc) and based on the relevant class of stakeholders (shareholders, clients, the government, the public etc).
Anyone heard back from kirkland following final AC?
From what I have seen on the forum they seem to have said they would get back to you guys by the end of last week and still haven’t been able to do so. 😭
Maybe they received way more applications than they’d expected this year. 🤷🏾♂️
Found the Willkie WE very hard, especially as a non-law grad.
Feel like I probably missed a lot of content.
Hoping that the vast majority of people progress to an interview!
Feel like I probably missed a lot of content.
Hoping that the vast majority of people progress to an interview!
that Willkie WE was... interesting. But just want to remind people that it isn't just the substance of your submission that is assessed. It's also testing how well you communicate! Having spoken to VS candidates last year, they've ALL stressed that point. So all is not lost guys, praying for the best💯
I second this. I remember listening to one of Willkie’s current trainees at their in-person open evening and he spoke about how he felt he had messed up so bad on the WE. It turned out he did well because his structure and written clarity was very good. 🙂🙂
I think right now we are all super nervous and uncertain but hopefully we all get good news from Willkie soon!
yeah i feel the same as you
Has anyone else been invited to Weil AC?
(btw I haven’t)
(btw I haven’t)
- Sep 9, 2024
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As long as you have some legal work experience and the firm is one that recruits a non-negligible part of its trainee cohort from the direct TC route, I would say yes. Two of my friends got TCs via the direct route in their penultimate year, and they were among the few who were applying for anything but vacation schemes. One of them had no prior VS or paralegal work experience and had only done an internship in a foreign country. As such, I cannot believe the success odds of a penultimate year application to be so low so as not to merit an application.
I promise you no law grad would’ve had prior knowledge. This content isn’t taught at undergrad
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