TCLA Premium: Now half price (£30/month). Applications, interviews, commercial awareness + 700+ examples.
Join →

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andrei Radu" data-source="post: 182359" data-attributes="member: 36777">Hi there, it's nice to meet you too, and thanks for first questions!What did I do differently in my 2nd cycle that led me to success? I would say the biggest differences in my approach between my 1st and 2nd cycle have been the following:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Amount of dedicated time: in my first cycle, while I spent several hours before submitting each application and attended a few careers events, I would estimate I was spending less than 3-4 hours per week on commercial law-related activities. In my second cycle, I would say I have been spending anything between 15 and 25 hours per week, depending on the period. With 15 to 25 hours every week, I had a lot more time to prepare for each specific application and to simultaneously invest in developing my commercial awareness.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Planning and consistency of effort: in my first cycle, I did not have a well-thought-out plan for my applications. Instead, I would do nothing for weeks, and only start researching and writing an application after hearing that the application window for a top firm was closing soon. Besides missing many deadlines of firms I was interested in, I wrote poor applications even for the firms where I did manage to apply – because I was always short on time for drafting and research. In my second cycle, I made a list of the roughly 15-20 firms I was interested in back in early September, noted down their deadlines in my calendar, and then planned out my next 3 months to space out my efforts. Thus, I set out my own deadlines and had at least a week’s time for researching and drafting for every application. This enabled me to avoid the being overloaded come December and to make every application good enough to have a decent shot of progressing.</li> </ul>Was there any particular part of the application process that I found particularly challenging, and how did I overcome it? In my first cycle, I was rejected at application stage every time, so that was definitely the biggest hurdle for me. There were three aspects of the application stage I had particular difficulty with:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">“Why this firm?” questions: This was by far the biggest difficulty for me. I was having problems with both (a) identifying the unique selling points of each firm; and with (b) finding a link between a unique selling point and something I have reasons to care about. Thus, my answers tended to be both vague, in that they applied to many other firms, and unconvincing, in that they did not truly represent my motivations. There were several things I did to overcome this:</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Started using resources like TCLA’s Law Firm Profiles, which both gave me unique selling points for individual firms, and also more broadly taught me what are the kinds of aspects of law firms I should be looking for in my research.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Significantly expanded the scope of my research, and started looking a lot particularly at Chambers Student, Chambers UK and Global Rankings, Legal 500 rankings, awards and recognition and news about the firm’s business in the legal press (The Lawyer is especially useful for this).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Asked for examples of successful applications from mentors, friends, and acquaintances, and started learning how I can tie unique selling points to my own motivations and experiences (for instance, I started linking my debating/mooting experience with an interest in a firm’s contentious work, and my negotiations experience to a firm’s transactional practices).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Writing style and structure: A significant problem is my first cycle was the verbosity and lack of structure of my applications. The primary way I remedied that was by asking for application reviews from my career mentors and friends, and then redrafting my written answers. For my first applications, it took 3 to 4 redrafts until I managed to achieve the appropriate style and structure.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Commercial awareness questions: In my first cycle, I was finding it difficult to understand both the overall business world, and the business of law firms. To remedy the first issue, I started investing roughly 1 hour per day in informing myself about commercial news – primarily by listening to podcasts (like the FT’s news briefing, Watson’s Daily, Bloomberg news) on my way to university and back. To learn about the business of law firms, I started attending many more firm events, many of which were available online and without an application process.</li> </ul>Do any of you have tips in terms of when to start prepping for future stages (ie. VI, AC, WG)?I would say your current approach (of focusing on applications) is the right one. As mentioned previously, this is generally the biggest roadblock. Besides improving your general commercial awareness, I did not do any preparation for the other stages until I received an invitation from a firm. For the WG, there are simply not that many resources you can use to prepare – I went through all the freely available ones in around two days before my first WG. For VIs, you generally have at least 3-4 days, and more commonly a week’s heads-up. Since most of their questions are relatively predictable, I do not think there is a lot of value to be gained by preparing more than around 8 hours – which you should be able to fit in the timeframe. For ACs, you will almost always have at least have a week’s heads-up, and normally more than that. Once again, I think there is a limit as to how much you can prepare, and I would not expect anything over 30-40 hours of preparation to add a lot of additional value.Finally, I just wanted to say you should definitely not be worried of sending too lengthy messages. The more detailed you are about your questions and situation, the more through our advice can be – and we’re here to help 😊!</blockquote>

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

Top Bottom

Search

Search

Reply to thread