Case studies are fictional simulations of real-life scenarios often encountered by lawyers in practice.

For most top City law firms, case studies form a crucial part of assessment centres, which are in turn the final stage of the graduate recruitment processes of many such firms when assessing candidates for vacation scheme and training contracts.

Legal or commercial?

Most case studies law firms use are commercial. That means you are tested more on your commercial acumen rather than your legal knowledge; this is to ensure that non-law students are not unfairly prejudiced.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of commercial concepts and jargon specific to each core practice area which you will need to be familiar with in order to do case studies with confidence.

Instructions Format

These case studies can range from single-page instructions to be completed within 1 hour, to 60-page, fairly technical instructions (complete with fictitious documents, contracts, press releases etc) to be completed within less than an hour. It all depends on the firm you are applying to.

The more time-pressed case studies often pose a stumbling block for candidates, with post-rejection feedback revolving around case study performance.

Deliverable Format

Most law firms will either require you to present your findings in written (e.g. email to partner, memorandum) or oral (e.g. timed presentation without slides) form.

The short answer is: (increasingly) no. This is especially true if you are targeting the top international commercial law firms in the City - magic and silver circle, and firms of similar size and calibre.

Competition for these firms are becoming ever-fiercer year on year. Case studies have become a mainstay for most, if not all, such firms.

If you apply for 6-10 firms in one cycle and make it to AC stage for any of them, you will in all likelihood have to tackle at least one case study.

In any case, the resources you will find here will greatly help you with developing commercial awareness, which you will need to demonstrate in and out of case studies.

Weaker candidates fear case studies because they see them as "open-ended" - that is, they can walk into the assessment and literally anything can be thrown at them. These candidates believe it is impossible to anticipate the topics, concepts and document formats that may come up.

All of that stems from a piecemeal, haphazard approach to preparing for case studies; preparing from a mixture of free/paid online resources, and hearsay from those who have previously done case studies at your target firm.

In truth, to reliably succeed at case studies, your preparation needs to be methodical and structured: you must go in with a solid grasp of broadly what the key topics are within each practice area, and how they each fit with each other to form the bigger picture.

This is why our Case Study Success Cribsheets, available under our Free Resources, are the perfect place to start preparing for each practice area. They provide a birds-eye, table of contents-style overview of each practice area, so that you can see the whole thing before drilling down into the nitty-gritty.

In our first release, we will target Corporate/M&A as the vast majority of case studies revolve around this practice area. In the next few months, we will gradually release case study packs for other practice areas for those who are applying to firms known for more specialised work.

Each of our Case Study Packs consists of 3 parts:

1. Candidate instructions: Depending on the level of difficulty, this can range from very brief to very lengthy.

2. Model answer: Our highly-detailed model answers use our colour-coding system, which indicates points which you must hit, and points which would be impressive (but not essential) if you manage to spot. This helps you stand a cut above the rest.

3. Explanatory notes: This is a marked-up version of the candidate instructions, containing in-line comments to ensure you catch every nuance, line by line.

To prevent unauthorised distribution, you will not be sent PDFs and will not be able to download or print PDFs - you will only be able to access the materials with internet access on a secure site, login instructions to which you will receive after payment. We are working on releasing hard copy versions soon.

The practice areas for which there are multiple case study packs (i.e. Corporate/M&A and Banking & Finance) are both areas for which candidates are likely to be expected to know more on than non-target areas, for example Real Estate.

No, but if time is of the essence and you can only manage practising one case study, we would recommend Corporate/M&A 1 (Beginner/Essentials), as most firms default to Corporate/M&A as the practice area of choice, and the Beginner/Essentials pack should give you at least the framework knowledge you need to tackle the real thing calmly.

Not at all. In fact, most candidates panic-prepare only after the receive AC invites, so by starting to gently prepare 2-3 months in advance, you're ahead of 95%. Law firms tend to send out these invites quite last-minute, meaning most people only get a few days to a few weeks (if they're lucky) to prepare. However, commercial awareness takes months to be internalised and understood - it's not really "crammable".

This is why so many candidates only start to pass assessment centres from their 2nd or 3rd attempt - their first one or two times were likely characterised by poor, last-minute preparation. By the time their next attempt rolls around, they would have had more time to internalise the knowledge they learnt from the previous attempt(s) (and more intensive practice in between). Then, eventually, they get that offer after a few tries.

Case Study Success aims to help you short-circuit that cycle so that you don't have to fall down again and again before you succeed.

It depends on the firm. Each firm has their own way of using case studies to assess aptitude, and so difficulty can range from a 1.5-page brief that's very general, commercial and intuitive that you have an hour to complete, to a 60+ page document pack that you have an hour to go through which expects hard commercial knowledge which you either know or you don't, and you get less than an hour to go through.

Case Study Success materials help you prepare for up to the hardest possible levels, so that you can be confident that if you can ace what you see on here, you can ace whatever else comes your way.

While our Case Study Packs were initially designed with aspiring commercial lawyers in mind, they contain highly practice area-specific content valuable in entry-level recruitment processes within other practice areas.

No. Paid materials are only accessible with login, and in accordance with our Terms of Use, your account will be suspended if we detect that you are logging into your account with different IP addresses within a short timeframe.

Crash Courses Guides are long-form yet concise guides containing everything you need to know about each practice area before you get into an assessment centre, with an intense focus on beginner-friendliness and our relational approach - that is, how everything fits together in the bigger picture, rather than giving you piecemeal knowledge which will simply result in overwhelm.

Not yet, but soon. Keep an eye out!

Congratulations! You know first-hand how hard it was to get here, and how important it is to do deliver stellar work during your time at your target firm in order to maximise your chances of becoming a future trainee.

If your VS seats may be any of our focus practice areas (Banking & Finance, Private Equity, Real Estate, Employment), our Quick-Start Guides and Case Study Packs in each of these areas will help you race well ahead of the competition.

Specifically:

• Our Quick-Start Guides will give you all the fundamentals you need to understand how topics fit together to form the bigger picture - crucial in being able to ask incisive, insightful questions to show off your commercial acumen and wow your supervisor.

• Our Level 3 (Advanced) Case Study Packs contain document excerpts from practice area-specific documents you are likely to encounter in real life. Having done the Advanced Packs will give you the confidence that you're not seeing daunting document categories for the first time during your vac scheme - even if you have never worked in a law firm before.