No employer in England and Wales publishes the criteria it marks interviews against. What is published, and what is consistent across the market, is the shape of the process: a sequence of stages, each designed to test one thing the previous stage could not. Prepare for the stage, not for the employer’s imagined preferences.
Everything below describes formats, not any particular employer’s process. If a firm or chambers tells you what its stages are, that beats this page.
The screening call tests whether you can be brief
Fifteen to twenty minutes, usually with a recruitment team rather than a lawyer, usually early. It exists to confirm the facts on your form, check your availability and eligibility, and hear you answer two questions: why this employer, and why law. The failure mode is length. A four-minute answer to “tell me about yourself” on a call booked for fifteen minutes has used a quarter of the process.
Have your own two questions ready, and make them about the work rather than about the training. Asking what a trainee in a named department actually does all day is a better question than asking about the structure of the seat system, which is on the website.
The video interview tests structure under a clock
Recorded, asynchronous, no interviewer: a question appears, you get a short time to think and a fixed time to answer, often with one retake or none. It is not testing rapport, because there is nobody to have rapport with. It is testing whether you can produce a structured answer to a question you have not seen, in ninety seconds, looking at a lens.
The things that help are mechanical. Answer the question asked rather than the one you prepared. Say your structure out loud — “two reasons: the first is…” — because an answer with visible joints is easier to mark. Stop when you have finished rather than filling the timer. And check the technical set-up in advance, because a bad recording is scored as a bad answer.
The competency interview tests evidence, not opinion
Thirty to sixty minutes, often two interviewers, one asking and one writing. The questions are retrospective: a time you worked in a team that was not working, a time you had to change your mind, a time you made a mistake. The assessor is listening for a specific event with your own actions in it, and is writing down what you personally did.
The structure to use is the ordinary one: the situation in one sentence, the task in one, what you did in four, and the result in two. Most weak answers invert that and spend the time on context. Two further rules: use “I” rather than “we” when describing your own actions, and have a genuine failure ready for the question about a mistake, because an answer in which the mistake turns out to have been somebody else’s is scored as evasion.
Employers mark against their own competency frameworks and do not publish them. Anyone offering you a named firm’s framework is guessing, and we do not publish one either.
The case study tests whether you will take a position
A pack of documents — a short brief, some correspondence, a set of figures, sometimes a news cutting — with a question at the end and between thirty minutes and two hours to prepare. You then discuss it with one or two interviewers who will push back on whatever you say.
The thing being tested is not legal knowledge. It is whether you can read a volume of material under time pressure, identify what actually matters, take a position, give reasons for it and then change your mind when given a good reason rather than defending a bad answer out of pride. Candidates who refuse to commit score badly, and so do candidates who will not move.
Say what you would advise, say what you are assuming, and say what would change your advice. Those three sentences cover most of what an assessor is looking for.
The written exercise tests whether you answer the client’s question
Usually a letter, an email or a note to a partner, drafted from a short brief in forty-five minutes to an hour. It is marked on whether you addressed the question actually asked, whether the structure can be followed by a reader in a hurry, whether the tone suits the named recipient and whether it is free of errors.
Leave five minutes to proofread. A document with a typo in the client’s name is a document that makes the point for the assessor.
The group exercise tests whether you make the group better
Four to eight candidates, a task, a time limit and assessors around the edge of the room who do not intervene. Each assessor is usually watching one or two named candidates and writing against the same criteria used everywhere else in the day.
It is not a competition for airtime, and the loudest person in the room is reliably not the highest-scoring one. What scores is bringing in the person who has not spoken, keeping the group to time, summarising where the discussion has got to and changing position when someone else is right. Saying nothing scores nothing, so if the exercise has a chair, the useful move is to volunteer for the role nobody wants: timekeeper.
The partner interview tests judgment, and whether you are safe with a client
Later in the process, often one or two partners, frequently with no fixed script. It can be the most conversational stage and it is the one where candidates relax too far. What is being tested is whether a partner would put you in a room with a client in eighteen months: judgment, curiosity and whether you have anything to say about the world the firm operates in.
Have one commercial story you have genuinely followed, know who it affects and why, and have an opinion about it that you can defend and qualify. One story followed properly is worth more than six headlines. Be able to say why this firm and not the one down the road without naming either firm’s revenue.
The pupillage panel is a different process at a different scale
Pupillage interviews are run by chambers, usually in two rounds, and the exercises are advocacy rather than consultancy: a legal problem to argue, an ethical dilemma, a bail or sentencing scenario, sometimes a passage to be criticised. Panels are large by the standards of a firm interview, often five to twelve members, and the questioning is adversarial by design — you are being tested on how you hold a position under pressure from people who do it for a living.
The scale is worth knowing before you start. There are 18,852 barristers on the Bar Standards Board’s register across 1,359 sets of chambers, of whom 15,104 are in self-employed practice and only 3,748 are employed by an organisation.
On the funnel itself, the Bar Council’s Pupillage Gateway report for 2024/25, published on 31 October 2025, records 683 pupillages advertised — an all-time high — against 3,912 candidates who submitted at least one application through the Gateway, up 14.8% in a year. The report records 287 offers made through the Gateway, and that is not the national offer count: 133 authorised training organisations recruited through the Gateway while 90 advertised there and recruited elsewhere, so roughly half of pupillage recruitment happens outside it. The report also describes its own first-round, second-round and offer-status data as compromised, because some organisations do not update candidate statuses. The 581 pupillages the Bar Standards Board registered in 2024 is the nearer-complete figure.
Four findings from the same report are worth more than any amount of technique, and all four are associations rather than demonstrated causes:
- Applicants who had done work experience or a mini-pupillage were four times more likely to receive an offer than those who had not.
- Candidates holding an Inn of Court scholarship have been over four times more likely to receive an offer than those without, consistently since 2022/23.
- 54% of those receiving an offer had a first-class degree, against 38% with a 2:1.
- For the first time, 1% of candidates with a 2:2 received an offer.
Those are correlations in one round of one application system. They do not prove that a mini-pupillage causes an offer, and the people who obtain mini-pupillages differ in other ways from the people who do not. What they do say is where a candidate’s effort has historically gone furthest.
The Bar Council reserves all rights in that report and prohibits permanent storage of its contents, so those figures are quoted here with attribution, are not held in our database and are not redrawn as a chart.
On the solicitor side, the numbers are published differently
The Solicitors Regulation Authority recorded 5,975 periods of recognised training — training contracts — registered in 2023/24, of which 88% were for trainees aged 30 or under, in its education and training monitoring report published in September 2025. There is no published count of applications per training contract, because firms hold that and do not release it.
Where the free material is
General interview technique is free and good, and it would be dishonest to charge for it. The National Careers Service covers competency answers and assessment centres, and Prospects publishes a law-specific set of likely questions.
The highest-value interview practice in this market is also free, because law firms pay for it. Aspiring Solicitors runs mock interviews with partner firms and one-to-one coaching at no charge, subject to its own eligibility criteria and the number of places it has. Forage publishes free job simulations written by law firms, including interview preparation modules carrying the firm’s own name. If you qualify for either, use them. We are not going to pretend they do not exist in order to sell you something thinner.
What we add is the question bank by stage and route, with a model answer and the reasoning behind it, and the case studies with their workings. Both are in preparation, and nobody is charged for them until they exist.
Timed mock interviews are in preparation and nobody is charged for them until they exist. When they arrive they will be marked against the criteria described on this page — the general ones these exercises are built on, since no employer publishes its own — and will carry no predicted outcome, for the same reason the CV checker has no score.
What nobody publishes
There is no published list of which employers use a competency interview, a case study, a video stage or a group exercise, and no regulator collects it. There are no published pass rates per stage. We do not have that data either, and when a page here says a format is common it is describing the market as advertised by employers, not counting it.
Next: the assessment centre day, and how the scores are pooled.
Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.