Graduate recruitment consumes significant partner and associate time — reviewing applications, designing assessment exercises, running scheme weeks, and evaluating candidates under time pressure. Much of this assessment is subjective, difficult to compare across evaluators, and hard to defend if challenged.
Simulation offers a more efficient, more objective alternative for a significant portion of this process.
A simulation exercise embedded in the application process or scheme week creates a consistent, comparable data point for every candidate. It tests applied legal thinking — how someone actually structures a problem, prioritises issues, and drafts an output — rather than how well they perform in an interview or write a covering letter.
It also signals something to applicants: that your firm trains differently, takes practical skill seriously, and invests in the kind of technology that defines modern legal practice. For the generation you are recruiting, that matters.
Assume a firm receives 800 vacation scheme applications. Partners review a shortlisted 200 at 20 minutes each.
| Variable | Without simulation | With simulation pre-screen |
|---|---|---|
| Candidates reviewed by partners | 200 | 60 |
| Partner review time | 67 hours | 20 hours |
| Cost at £500/hour | £33,500 | £10,000 |
| Saving per cycle | — | £23,500 |
| Variable | Figure |
|---|---|
| Partners in attendance per centre | 3 |
| Days per centre | 2 |
| Centres per year | 2 |
| Total partner facilitation time | 48 hours |
| Value of that time | £24,000 |
Structured simulation data — completed independently by candidates before the assessment centre — replaces a meaningful portion of those exercises with a more objective, more scalable alternative.
Every cohort that completes a simulation assessment generates benchmarking data. Over two or three intake years, a firm begins to understand what high-performing candidates actually look like at the application stage — and can refine selection criteria accordingly. No other assessment format produces this at scale.
Simulation does not replace the judgment that good recruiters bring to selection. It removes the low-value, high-cost work — bulk file review, inconsistent exercise scoring, facilitation of standard tasks — so that partner time is spent where it genuinely cannot be replaced.