Hey,
1. I believe they all fall under the remit of an interview. There will be other types, such as commercial awareness and situational judgement interviews, which test your commercial awareness and ability to react to different scenarios, respectively. Competency interviews are quite similar to situational interviews, though they test certain competencies - such as proactivity, juggling multiple commitments, resilience, and so on. These differ on the law firm and what they‘re looking for, but most law firms will look for similar traits in their trainees. Questions could include things like give me an example of how you showed integrity, or handled many tasks on demanding deadlines. You answer these well by linking to your experiences, highlighting what the problem was, your effort, the outcome, any feedback you got which could exemplify your effort - essentially, STAR.
In CV-based ones, they will literally take your CV and ask you questions on this or ask you to highlight or touch more on certain areas. It’s confusing because a competency based interview could involve the person having your CV with them and asking you to explain how you demonstrate those competencies. In any case, knowing your CV in and out helps.
2. Some companies I know offer TCs;
- BBC
- PwC
- Channel 4
Essentially, virtually every company will have an in-house legal team and there will be vacancies within them you can apply for. This will usually be legal analyst roles, or even paralegal roles too, etc.
