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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jaysen" data-source="post: 4672" data-attributes="member: 1">3. Herbert Smith Freehills Vacation Scheme Interview 2018When was your Herbert Smith Freehills interview? November 2018What was it for? Winter Vacation SchemePlease describe the interview process at Herbert Smith Freehills.The day started off with a very brief talk by two of the Grad Rec partners who explained a bit about the firm, and you have a very brief Q&A with them before the interviews begin. The day was structured into three interviews which are supposed to last 35 minutes each, and also a tour of the office with a trainee (thankfully this is un-assessed).For me, my actual assessment began with the case study based interview. You have a document brief that explains the instructions to you - you have 45 minutes to get through a sizeable amount of content and synthesise this into a 10 minute presentation to a partner. The partner will then ask you some questions based off of your presentation for a further 25 minutes, some of these are given beforehand too.After this, I was moved onto the competency interview. This was the most nerve-wracking particularly as a non-law student as the partner started with the dreaded ‘why law?’ and ‘why HSF?’ questions. Then after this, I was asked about competencies like teamwork, organisation etc; the partner also picked up on my volunteering as a student teacher so asked me about the most challenging aspect of this experience.Then came the office tour, which was pretty standard and was a good way to catch my breath.The final interview that I had was a scenario-based interview. This was a bit of an odd one and is new this year. Essentially, this consisted of a partner talking to me about a piece of work that they had done and you end up talking through what you would do in this scenario and any points that you thought were pertinent.What advice would you give to future applicants for the Herbert Smith Freehills interview?My best piece of advice is to try to stay as calm as possible and be friendly to everyone you come into contact with. It was a real pleasure that everyone that I met on the day, both employees and the other candidates, were all lovely. I think that this helped to foster an atmosphere where, although you were in competition, it didn’t feel incredibly cut-throat. This is sort of supported by the fact that at the outset, Grad Rec tell you that the firm has enough spaces for all of the candidates that it deems good enough for a vac scheme!One way that I prepared for the competency interview was that using my CV and other applications that I had completed, I wrote down all of my experiences and bullet-pointed the skills that I thought I had gained from each one. This helped me with being able to know what to talk about from each experience if a particular skill came up. As well as this, the partner who I had was very probing and he kept asking me to clarify so I’d say make sure you’re very carefully listening to the wording of the question so you are answering the question at all times.As well as this, with the case-study interview, I would say definitely stick to a structure that goes over the main legal points in your presentation to the partner. Make sure that you’re reading through all of the information carefully so as to not miss anything but they give you questions to guide you so try to stick to these! BUT don’t just reel off the facts or go over the document in a chronological order as the ‘client’ (role-played by the partner) will not want to hear legal jargon but will want to know the most relevant points.With the scenario-based interview, it isn’t too bad as long as you can justify what you’re saying or explain why you think X action is what you’d do. In my opinion, this scenario interview isn’t really one you can prepare for though since it’s just a case that the partner has done - you’d have to be the *luckiest* person in the world to get a case that you’d researched about beforehand so I wouldn’t worry about trying to pre-empt this scenario. Also, I would say the best strategy is trying to say whatever it is that you’re thinking so that the partner can see how you think and break things down.</blockquote>

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