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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jessica Booker" data-source="post: 117165" data-attributes="member: 2672">I respect Chrissie a lot and think she has a lot of great advice. There are some points she is making that are accurate. Some mitigating circumstances are weaker (e.g. saying you had a cold) but I don't agree with her point about some bigger firms being tougher on this. In fact, from my experience, it's more of the smaller firms that can be pickier.The firm will likely ask your university for a reference to verify the circumstances. They can't just take the claim that the circumstances happened because you said they did. And that's where Chrissie has got a point on the seriousness of the circumstances. Ultimately one of the clearest benchmarks of how serious the circumstances were are if you told your university of the circumstances or sought some form of support to help you with them (even if this is outside of the university - e.g. GPs/counsellors etc).I understand this can be tricky - a lot of people don't want to seek support or worse don't know they can seek support, but again this can be part of how your circumstances are interpreted. It demonstrates self-awareness and an ability to seek advice/guidance/support to ensure the best possible outcome - that quality is needed by the bucket load as a lawyer.Recruiters can find it difficult to take mitigating circumstances on board is when there is no ability to verify them. That's where I think Chrissie has interpreted it wrong - its not that they sit there and think "you couldn't cope with the pressures of working here", it comes down to more that they often have a limited interpretation of them, and unfortunately will side with a more cynical view. That's where how you describe your circumstances can help in situations where you don't have the ability to get someone else to verify them - being clear in how they impacted your studies/assessments and highlighting precise ways in which the circumstances disrupted your life is important in helping the recruiter interpret it.It is ultimately rarely the mitigating circumstances themselves that are being considered, it is more about how they impacted you and that's what the recruiter has to try and understand.</blockquote>

Verification: Our company is called, "The Corporate ___ Academy". What is the missing word here?

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