
SECOND YEAR
For penultimate-year students, firms will hold Vacation Schemes, which are internship programmes designed to give you an in-depth experience of life as a solicitor.
These schemes usually last one to three weeks and offer students hands-on experience. Vacation schemes are highly competitive and typically involve an application process that includes multiple steps, including submitting a form or CV and Cover Letter, and often completing an interview or assessment.
Not only are these schemes an excellent way to gain practical skills and insights, but they also often serve as a direct pathway to securing a training contract with the firm.
SELL
YOUR STRENGTHS
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Use your personal experiences to show what type of person you are. For example:
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If you play a sport, you could detail the resilience that you gained from training and getting better at it.
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Character-developing experiences like these show recruiters how resilient, hardworking, determined, and independent you can be.
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Recruiters want candidates who know how to communicate, have great attention to detail, and can work effectively as part of a team.
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Use personal and professional experiences to sell your strengths in your applications by highlighting what you gained from those experiences.​
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Study your applications. Think long and hard about each question: what the question is actually asking you, what the recruiter wants to see, how you can best showcase your skills and character. Focus on how to answer the question in a way that makes sense, is easy to read for the recruiter, and that flows from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph.
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You can always enrich your answers in some way, even if you’ve already reached the word limit–you can strip it down and build it back up again, stronger, like a muscle. The key message here is that you should not be afraid to experiment with new ways to build your applications stronger, and the process of deleting and replacing words in your applications is the way to do that.
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Therefore, treat your applications like essays in the sense that you should be spending hours thinking and writing them, and experimenting in ways to get your message across most effectively. ​
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Firms want to see candidates who are genuinely interested in the work that they do. Tailoring an application is the process of making each application individual to a firm. A general rule that applies is: that if you can copy and paste an answer to an application question from one firm to another, it is not tailored.
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Ensure that your answers to application questions align with the firms culture and values. It is vital to demonstrate an interest in the firm you are applying to through research.
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You should search the firm’s website for: practice areas and rankings, diversity and inclusion initiatives that resonate with you, recent or historic deals that interest you, training contract structure, training contract intake number, international strategy, clients, culture and values, hours of pro bono work, etc.
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Also look at websites such as ChambersStudent, Legal Cheek, Legal500,TheLawyerPortal, LawCareers.Net, The Commercial Law Academy, The Corporate Law Academy, etc.,
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- Some questions, such as ‘Why are you interested in commercial law?’ or ‘Tell us about a time that you demonstrated resilience’ will be more generally answered, and that is okay.
However, you can still tailor these answers. For ‘why commercial law,’ talk about why commercial law generally, but also detail reasons that you are applying to go into commercial law at that firm in particular; for example, you could talk about firm A specialising in XYZ practice areas that you are interested in.
TAILOR
TO THE FIRM
How To Succeed At Interviews
You have been invited to an interview as part of your assessment centre with the firm. In other words, the firm is satisfied that you have the potential to be one of their next trainees.
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All of the effort that you have put in–the hours of research, thinking deeply about answering questions and tailoring your application, developing your commercial awareness, practising and taking multiple psychometric tests, revising for and undertaking video interviews, and completing any other stages antecedent to the interview stage—boils down to this.
No pressure at this point, right? Interviews are often the most daunting part of the application process because of the immense pressure they place on candidates, and this is why it is important for you to do everything that you can to maximise your success.
PREPARATION
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What should you prepare?
Personal, competency, motivational, commercial awareness, technical and other questions (see more on this below – common interview questions).
​How much should you prepare?
As much as possible. This will help you to cover every possibility and minimise the chances of a difficult question coming up that you haven’t prepared for.
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CAR/ STARR
CAR (Context, Action, Result):
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Context: Briefly set the scene and provide relevant background information.
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Action: Describe the specific steps you took to address the situation.
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Result: Highlight the outcome and its impact, ideally with measurable results.
STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result):
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Situation: Explain the scenario to provide context.
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Task: Clarify your role and what you were responsible for achieving.
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Action: Detail the steps you took to complete the task.
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Result: Share the outcome, emphasizing its significance.