Unofficial. Original scenarios written by Assize Careers. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by the Civil Service, the Government Legal Department or any employer. Our practice questions are written by us in the published formats. They are not the test publishers' own questions, we do not reproduce any publisher's items or convert your result into their scores or percentiles, and Assize Careers is not affiliated with, authorised by or endorsed by any test publisher, assessment provider, regulator or law firm.
Why a law careers site covers the Civil Service version
Because it is the only one anybody can read. The Government Legal Profession and the Government Legal Department recruit through Civil Service processes, so for a large legal employer this is the actual test. It is also the only situational judgement material in this field published under the Open Government Licence, which means its guidance can be quoted, built on and used commercially with acknowledgement. Every other employer's test is private, including every City firm's.
The Civil Service publishes guidance and a free unscored practice demonstration, and that demo sets out three question types: self-report statements, video scenarios and text scenarios. Sit it. It is free, it is authentic, and it is unscored: the official guidance and practice test are on GOV.UK.
The three question types
- Self-report statements
- A statement about how you work, which you rate against yourself. There is no correct answer in the sense the other sections have one, and the useful response is a consistent and honest one.
- Video scenarios
- A filmed situation, usually a conversation, followed by questions about what you would do next. The content is ordinary workplace behaviour rather than law.
- Text scenarios
- A written situation with a set of possible responses. You either rate each response for effectiveness or pick the most and least effective. Which convention applies will be in the instructions, and it changes your approach.
How long it takes and how it is marked
Timing and length are set by the employer and are given in the invitation, so this page states neither. Marking is against a key the employer built, usually from what its own experienced staff judged effective, and that key is not published by anybody. Nobody outside the organisation knows it, which means nobody can sell you the answers and anybody claiming to has made them up.
What follows from that is worth understanding before you practise. Where the test asks you to rate each response, part of the score usually comes from how far your rating sits from theirs, so a cautious middle rating on everything is not safe: it just disagrees with the key quietly. Where it asks for most and least effective, the least effective answer is often the easier mark, because the clearly wrong response is less contestable than the best one.
What it is actually measuring
Three things, all behavioural. Whether you know the limits of your own role and authority. Whether you act on a problem rather than storing it up. And whether you keep the client, the court and your supervisor informed when something goes wrong. For a solicitors' firm the frame is the regulator's published competence statement, which describes what a competent solicitor does rather than what they know, and for the Civil Service it is the published behaviours framework the invitation will name.
How candidates lose marks
- Playing the hero. Options where you solve a client's problem yourself, outside your competence or your authority, read as confident and score badly. Legal work is supervised, and the test knows it.
- Pure escalation with nothing else. Forwarding it to your supervisor is right and incomplete. The high-scoring response usually also acknowledges the person waiting and protects the deadline.
- Waiting. Options that defer until someone is free are a common wrong answer in any scenario with a time limit in it. The time limit is in the scenario deliberately.
- Answering as the person you think they want. On self-report items, a candidate selecting the extreme answer every time produces a pattern, and inconsistency across similar statements is visible.
- Ignoring the instruction. Rating every response "highly effective" when you were asked to differentiate throws away the information the test is collecting.
What to do about it
Read the scenario for three things: what is urgent, whose decision it is, and who is left uninformed if you do nothing. Then choose the response that handles all three. If one response does something irreversible, or commits your employer, or gives advice you are not authorised to give, it is almost always the least effective one.
Three scenarios, written by us
Our own, grounded in the ordinary duties a paralegal or trainee has, and in the regulator's published competence statement. They are not reproduced from any employer's test, and they do not replicate any named firm's assessment, because no firm publishes one.
You are a paralegal. At 9.15am a client emails you directly asking whether she should sign a settlement offer that expires tomorrow at noon. The solicitor supervising the matter is in a hearing all day. The client says she needs an answer within the hour. Which response is the most effective?
- Reply with your own view of whether she should sign, since the deadline is tomorrow and someone has to answer.
- Reply at once to say you have her email, that advising on whether to sign is not something you can do, and when she can expect an answer; then flag the noon deadline to the supervisor's clerk and to the team inbox immediately.
- Wait until the supervisor comes out of the hearing and raise it then.
- Forward the email to the supervisor and leave it there.
Answer and explanation
B. It does all three of the things the scenario is testing: it answers the person who is waiting, it stays inside your authority by not advising, and it gets the deadline in front of somebody who can act on it today rather than this evening.
D is the attractive wrong answer. It is not wrong in substance, which is what makes it dangerous: escalating is correct. It scores lower because it leaves the client with silence and the deadline with no owner, and because a single email into a hearing is not a reliable route. A is the least effective: whether to accept a settlement offer is advice, and giving it without authority is a risk to the client as well as to you. C fails on the clock, which the scenario put there on purpose.
A colleague in another team asks you to send over a completed agreement from a matter you worked on last year, to use as a precedent for a new client. The document is the former client's, and it contains their commercial terms. Which response is the most effective?
- Send it, with the client's name and address deleted.
- Send it and ask your colleague to keep it to themselves.
- Decline, explain why, and offer to look for a drafting precedent in the firm's own precedent bank or to ask whether the former client's consent can be sought.
- Report your colleague to the supervising partner.
Answer and explanation
C. It protects the former client's confidentiality, treats a colleague's reasonable request reasonably, and solves the actual problem, which is that someone needs a precedent.
A is the trap. Deleting the name feels like the compliant option, which is why it is offered, but confidentiality attaches to the client's information and not only to their name, and the commercial terms are the part that identifies and belongs to them. B is worse, because it adds a request that the recipient keep quiet about it. D is disproportionate: the colleague has asked for something they should not have, not committed misconduct, and a response that escalates before speaking to them will read as poor judgement. Escalation becomes the right answer if they press after being told no.
A self-report item, in the published Civil Service style. Rate how accurately this describes you: "When I am given a deadline verbally, I check it against the source document rather than relying on what I remember."
- Strongly disagree
- Disagree
- Neither agree nor disagree
- Agree
- Strongly agree
Answer and explanation
There is no correct answer here, and that is the point of including one. Self-report items are not marked like the scenarios: they are compared with other things you say about yourself and, in some processes, with the behaviours the employer has published as part of the role.
Two things follow. First, answer as the person who will turn up on the first day, because an inflated profile is detectable across a set of similar statements and is awkward to defend at interview, where this ground often comes back. Second, notice that "neither agree nor disagree" is not a safe hiding place. It is a position, and a set of them says you have no habits either way.
What nobody publishes
No law firm publishes its situational judgement scoring key, its question bank or its competency weightings, and no licensed source for any firm's assessment exists. So there is no page on this site claiming to prepare you for a named firm's test, and no claim that practice moves your score. What practice can do is make the format familiar and make you quicker at spotting which option oversteps, and that is the whole of what is offered here.
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.