The most common biglaw interview questions (& how to answer them)

in this video we're going to be talking about some of the most commonly asked questions in big law interviews more specifically the types of questions that you're going to be asked as a law student during your on-campus recruiting season when law firms come to your campus and you have to do back-to-back interviews sometimes up to 30 of them at a time as always please hit that sub button and drop a comment if you have ideas or suggestions for a video or a legal topic that you want to hear about and let's get started let's first cover some basic information about what the first round of big law interviews usually looks like they're anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes long they're typically non-quantitative so they're not going to be asking you complex legal questions or testing your ability to think like a lawyer or your knowledge of doctrine of a specific area of law instead they're looking more at your character and whether or not you'd be a good fit for the firm on the personality side to that end the questions are actually pretty simple so let's talk about a few of them the first and most common question you're going to be asked usually the very first one out of the gate is tell me about yourself the law firm will have your resume in front of them so they'll know more or less the work experience that you've done in your grades and whatnot but now it's on you to succinctly tell them the story in your own words and usually what this looks like is saying okay well I went to school I had a job in between law school this is what I did in that job couple sentences I went to law school and now in law school I've spent my extracurricular times doing this and that and looking ahead I now want to work at an esteemed firm to build my expertise in this specific practice area et cetera Etc nothing fancy here just be confident in your answer whatever your answer is question number two what kind of law do you want to practice do you know right now now this one is tricky a lot of law students don't exactly know what kind of law they want to practice when they're in law school and part of the problem with that is that in law school you don't really get hands-on experience with the different areas of law so it's kind of impossible to know in fact the summer associate program is one of the most helpful ways that you as a law student can learn and figure out okay I like this and I don't like this now if you know what kind of law you want to do let's say transactional versus litigation and you want to do transactional come out of the gate and say it and don't be shy about it yeah I'd love to practice transactional law because I love helping businesses grow in my background in business and economics lends itself to that totally fine if you don't know it's also okay to disclose that just do so openly with compassion and of course with a little bit of confidence for example that's a great question I'm not actually entirely sure yet which area of law I want to practice most I have a deep interest in litigation and I really enjoyed the memo drafting assignment that we did our one all year but I also love the transactional aspect of lot helping companies grow so it's my hope that during my summer program you know more specifically with your firm I can get that hands-on experience that will let me decide and finalize what area of law I want to hone in on question number three where do you see yourself in five years and in 10 years this one's pretty easy in five years I see myself as a lawyer practicing at your firm ideally as a mid-level associate and in 10 years well this is up to you maybe you see yourself out in government maybe you see yourself rising up to become partner maybe you see yourself in Academia there's nothing wrong with these answers stating something to the effect that you don't plan on being in big law forever a lot of these firms they know they're not stupid that most of these kids that they're interviewing yourself included are probably not going to end up there long term I personally still think it's a good idea for the five-year timeline to say that you plan on staying in The Firm in part because law firms tend to make the most money off of their mid-level Associates and the least money off of their junior Associates so they don't want someone who's just going to come for one or two years and then leave they want someone who's going to stay ideally till years six seven eight and then yeah maybe they'll leave or maybe they'll stay till partner but at that point it's not that important for the 10-year Mark I think you should answer whatever you really see yourself doing in 10 years but again do it with confidence question number four hey I see that you have done this work experience tell me about that this question is obviously going to depend on your resume I worked at the White House when I was in college so I got a lot of questions during my interviews about hey tell me about your time at the White House what did you do what was that like but for other people it's about their time in consulting or banking or working as a paralegal this is different than the first question tell me about yourself because the interviewer is asking you to dive deeper into the specific area of work and the work experience that you have on your own resume so just be prepared to talk intelligently about your time at every place that you worked that is listed on your resume and the last question you're probably gonna see at some point tell me about about a time that you had a challenge and how you overcame it or tell me about a time that you faced adversity and how you got through it with these types of questions I think it's a good idea to have a story in your back pocket that you're ready to whip out on a moment's notice and tell your interview for myself I talked about the grief of when my grandmother suddenly passed away when I was in college while I was juggling studying for the LSAT and working full-time and doing my school work and how it was incredibly stressful and I didn't know how I would get past this grief that I felt but through really effective time management and taking time for myself I was able to heal from it eventually it just took a lot of time that answer worked for me for a couple of reasons first it's vulnerable and people love vulnerability in general because it's so rare a lot of people are going to answer this question with some sort of like work related issue they probably had you know but it's not necessary I also clearly talked about the challenge and what it was what I did to overcome it and how I came out on the other side those three elements in whatever your answer is they need to be clear the worst thing for this type of question is to Jumble your response and say oh I had this PowerPoint that I had to get done really late um but it worked out and I got it done and you know my boss was happy yeah you answered the question but you didn't really provide much about your character you didn't talk about how you approached the problem and used your problem-solving abilities to solve it and you kind of just said something in 10 seconds when really an answer to this should be closer to 45 seconds to a minute and a half as a bonus question you're probably gonna see this and it doesn't matter a whole lot by way of the interviewers weighing your application but it's still important to get it right is what do you do for fun what are your hobbies what do you do outside of school and outside of your future career as a lawyer typically when you apply to these law firms you're going to have a line in your resume that says Hobbies or extracurriculars you know for fun and the key here is to just be relatable just do something vanilla that you can talk about for a minute with a smile on your face it could be Star Wars it could be video games it could be hiking it could be cooking but don't do weirdly esoteric stuff like playing with voodoo dolls or in the words of a classmate Big Trees don't overthink it just be a human being all right everybody that's it for me in this video I hope you found this helpful if you're thinking about going into big law or if you're a law student or you're thinking about becoming a lawyer as always please hit that sub button and drop a comment if you have ideas for a video that you want to see or if you want specific advice about big law or the legal profession or even some legal analysis of things happening in pop culture and don't forget we have a Discord it's linked in the caption below you can ask me a question there anytime we talk about pre-law advice career advice and mental health in there too all right be well drink some water take some deep breaths and I'll see you next time [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Julian Sarafian

Views: 9,824

Keywords: biglaw, interview, law, lawyer, biglaw interview, interview tips, law school, lawstudent, OCI, EIP, interviewing in biglaw, what is biglaw, biglaw money

Id: c2ZEuYoM4TM

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023