Large international law firm written exercise

These tasks were the first stage of the assessment centre, and I had to complete them on my laptop during a Zoom call with my camera on. 

Some documents were emailed to me at the start of the task, and I had to submit my work by email at the end of the allotted time. I was not permitted to look anything up.

Task 1

I was given a fictional NDA and a corresponding playbook (i.e. a document setting out how the client likes to approach NDA edits) and then tasked with marking up the NDA in tracked changes in accordance with this playbook. I also had to identify general spelling, grammar and formatting errors. The point of this task was to test attention to detail and we were told that this was a frequent task for paralegals at the firm.

There was then a second element where I was asked to respond to a client’s email and answer some questions relating to the NDA. The answers were all identifiable by reading the clauses.

I was given 1 hour and 10 minutes in total for this task.

Task 2

This was a prioritisation task. I was provided with a list of 5 tasks on a to-do list and was asked to rank them all in terms of priority with my reasoning, and explain how I would deal with people who are competing for my time. This was difficult as every task on the list involved a senior member of the team or an urgent task. I was given 15 minutes for this.

Advice from the successful candidate

The written task is difficult to prepare for as it could be any number of tasks, however I would advise that in order to be best prepared for this research into common written tasks to understand what could come up. It is also well worth brushing up on your legal terminology and attention to detail to ensure you feel confident.