How to Perform in a Law Firm Group Exercise: What Recruiters Are Actually Watching

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The group exercise is the part of an assessment centre that candidates worry about most, and for understandable reasons. You are in a room with people you have never met, dealing with personalities you have had minutes to read, working on a task that is often deliberately abstract, under time pressure, while being observed and scored. It is a genuinely unusual situation and the concern most candidates feel going into it is entirely legitimate.

What this guide offers is something more useful than reassurance: a clear picture of what recruiters are actually scoring, why the exercise is structured the way it is, how the most common mistakes happen and how to avoid them, and what the candidates who perform best actually do differently.

Why firms run group exercises at all

This is worth understanding properly because it changes how you approach the task itself.

You will be part of a practice area team. You will work alongside colleagues on complex matters that require coordinated effort across different people with different responsibilities. You will work with clients, which involves its own kind of collaboration: understanding what they need, managing their expectations, and working with multiple individuals on the client side over time. At every level of a legal career, from trainee to partner, the ability to operate effectively within a team is not a soft skill sitting alongside the technical work. It is part of the technical work.

This is why recruiters treat the group exercise as one of the most revealing parts of an assessment day. If they only wanted to assess your analytical ability or your legal knowledge, they would give you a case study or a written exercise. They ask you to work as a group specifically because they want to see something that a written exercise cannot show: how you think, communicate, and operate when other people are in the room.

What recruiters are scoring

Firms use a structured scoring framework during group exercises. Assessors sit in the room with a list of competencies in front of them and score each candidate against each one as the exercise unfolds. The specific competencies vary between firms, but the underlying qualities being assessed are broadly consistent across the market.

The most common ones include: whether the candidate contributes substantively to the group's output, whether they collaborate genuinely rather than just performing collaboration, whether they show leadership at appropriate moments without dominating, whether they engage with other people's ideas rather than just advancing their own, whether they demonstrate commercial thinking in how they approach the task, whether they help the group manage its time effectively, and whether their conduct throughout is professional and collegiate.

One thing candidates frequently misunderstand is the relative importance of the outcome versus the process. The recruiters are watching how you operate together, not just what you produce. A group that reaches a mediocre conclusion through a genuinely collaborative, well-structured process will often score better than a group that reaches a strong conclusion through dysfunction, talking over each other, and one person dominating. This does not mean the outcome is irrelevant, but it means that candidates who focus exclusively on producing the right answer and neglect how they are operating with the people around them are misreading what the exercise is for.

Before the exercise starts: the introduction section

Most assessment days begin with an introductory session where all candidates are brought together and introduced to the day. The recruiter or assessment day lead will explain the structure, cover housekeeping, and typically ask candidates to introduce themselves to the room, sometimes with a prompt like "tell us something interesting about yourself."

This moment matters more than most candidates appreciate. It is the first opportunity the assessment team has to observe how candidates present themselves, how they listen when others are speaking, and whether their manner in an informal context is consistent with how they present in a more structured one. Think before you arrive about what you would say if asked to introduce yourself or share something interesting. It does not need to be dramatic or unusual, but having something prepared means you are not visibly searching for an answer in a room full of people who are also being assessed.

Use this time to observe the other candidates as well. You will be working with some of them in the group exercise, and even a few minutes of informal interaction gives you a sense of different personalities and communication styles that is genuinely useful when you are in the room together.

The reading phase: do not rush it

Once you are seated with your group and given the task materials, you will typically have a short reading period before the discussion begins. This phase is more important than it sounds, and it is where the first mistakes tend to happen.

The most common early mistake is someone in the group taking control before everyone has finished reading, rushing the group into discussion before they have properly understood the task. The motivation is usually to appear decisive and demonstrate leadership, but it signals something different to a recruiter: a candidate who prioritises being seen to lead over making sure the group actually understands what it is being asked to do. As a lawyer, thoroughness matters. Reading carefully and making sure you understand the full picture before acting is a professional quality, not a delay.

If this happens in your group, handle it calmly and directly. Something like: "I think it would be worth making sure everyone has had a chance to read through properly so we are all working from the same understanding" is enough. It is polite, it is constructive, and it will land well with the assessors watching.

Also check both sides of any document you are given. It sounds obvious, but candidates regularly miss content on the back of a page because they assume they have read everything. In a timed exercise, missing part of the task brief can significantly affect the quality of the group's output.

The two types of group exercise task

Group exercise tasks tend to fall into one of two categories, and understanding which type you have been given affects how you should pace the work.

The first type is a discussion-based task: a relatively open topic where the group is asked to discuss, reach a position, and present recommendations. These can often get into substance quickly because there is not a large volume of information to process first.

The second type is an analytical task: a client scenario or business problem with supporting documents, data, or background information that the group needs to work through before it can form recommendations. These tasks have a genuine information processing challenge built into them, and groups that rush into discussion without properly absorbing the material tend to produce shallow outputs.

On an analytical task, the most important early decision is how the group is going to manage its time across reading, discussion, and preparation for presentation. If you have 45 minutes total and the materials are substantial, spending 25 minutes on reading leaves very little time for discussion. A brief, structured conversation at the start about how to allocate time is not a waste of it.

The biggest mistake recruiters see: splitting into mini groups

Of all the things that go wrong in group exercises, this is the one that concerns recruiters most, and it happens regularly.

Someone in the group, usually someone trying to demonstrate organisational thinking, suggests splitting into pairs or smaller sub-groups to work through different sections of the task and then reconvene to share findings. On the surface this sounds efficient. In practice it immediately breaks the group dynamic that the exercise is designed to observe.

The moment the group splinters, the assessors lose the ability to observe most candidates properly. They can only listen to one sub-group at a time, which means significant portions of each candidate's participation go unscored. The whole point of the exercise is for the group to operate together: to share ideas, respond to each other, build on contributions, and reach conclusions through genuine discussion. Splitting up eliminates most of that.

If someone suggests this in your group, this is your moment. Raise the concern clearly and propose an alternative: "I wonder if it might be more effective to work through this together as a group so we can all build on each other's thinking. We could structure it by going through each section in turn." This kind of intervention is exactly what recruiters want to see, because it shows you understand the purpose of the exercise and have the confidence to redirect the group constructively.

Dominating versus leading: the difference matters

There is a version of leadership that impresses in a group exercise and a version that consistently scores poorly, and the difference between them is not obvious to every candidate going in.

The version that scores poorly is the candidate who talks the most, pushes their ideas hardest, talks over others, and treats every group decision as an opportunity to be the one whose view prevails. This is not leadership. It is dominance, and recruiters who have observed many group exercises identify it quickly. The candidate who behaves this way typically believes they are performing well. The assessors watching are usually reaching a different conclusion.

The version that scores well is the candidate who contributes substantively and consistently, who listens as actively as they speak, who advances the group's thinking rather than just their own position, and who exercises leadership in specific moments when the group needs direction rather than continuously throughout. That might mean proposing a structure at the start, steering the discussion when it gets stuck, bringing in a quieter member of the group when they have something to contribute, or redirecting the conversation when it has gone off task.

None of this means being passive. You need to contribute your own ideas, defend your positions when challenged, and make sure your voice is heard throughout. The point is that what you are heard saying, and how you say it, matters as much as the volume of your contribution.

Bringing in the quiet person

There will almost always be someone in your group who is quieter than the others, either because they are naturally more reserved, because they are nervous, or because the more dominant voices in the room have made it difficult for them to find a moment to contribute.

Actively bringing this person into the conversation is one of the most effective things you can do in a group exercise, and it is also the most genuinely collaborative. Something as simple as: "We haven't heard from everyone yet — did you have any thoughts on this?" or "I'd be interested to hear what you think about the [specific point] before we move on" takes five seconds and signals to the assessors that you are thinking about the group's output rather than just your own performance.

This is worth doing even when the strategic incentive for it might feel counterintuitive. Some candidates hesitate to bring in a quieter person because they feel that person is a competitor and helping them contribute is somehow disadvantageous. The recruiters watching see this differently: the candidate who brings others in is demonstrating exactly the collaborative quality the exercise is designed to surface.

Showing commercial awareness in the task

Most group exercise tasks have a commercial dimension, even when the topic is not explicitly legal. The group might be asked to advise a client on a strategic decision, evaluate competing options, or produce recommendations for a business scenario. In each of these, there is an opportunity to show that you are thinking about the problem commercially rather than just analytically.

Commercial thinking in a group exercise means asking the questions that a good commercial advisor would ask: what is the client actually trying to achieve, what are the constraints on their options, what are the risks and how material are they, and what is the most practical recommendation given all of that? It means not just identifying the best theoretical answer but identifying the best answer given the real-world context the task provides.

Candidates who frame their contributions in these terms, rather than treating the task as an academic exercise, tend to stand out because they are demonstrating the orientation toward client service that underpins commercial legal practice. For a full framework on how commercial thinking works in a legal context, see our commercial awareness guide.

The presentation at the end

Most group exercises conclude with a presentation of the group's findings and recommendations, either to the assessors alone or to all candidates from both groups if the assessment day has been split into two teams.

The presentation is a continuation of the group exercise, not a separate thing. How the group organises itself to present, who speaks on which sections, how individuals handle the transition between speakers, and how the group responds to questions from the assessors are all observed and scored.

A few things matter here specifically. First, the group should agree on structure and speaker allocation before the presentation begins, not during it. Disagreements or confusion about who is saying what in front of the assessors are avoidable and score poorly. Second, every member of the group should speak during the presentation where possible. A group where one person presents most of the content while others stand silently signals a dynamic that has not been working well. Third, when answering questions from assessors, the group should respond collaboratively rather than one person fielding everything. If an assessor directs a question at the group, candidates who add to or build on each other's answers demonstrate the collaborative quality that the exercise is measuring throughout.

The pitfalls, in brief

Rushing the reading phase because appearing decisive feels like leadership. It is not. Thoroughness is a legal quality and recruiters recognise it.

Dominating the conversation. Volume of contribution is not the same as quality of contribution, and assessors have seen this many times.

Splitting into sub-groups. This fragments the exercise, disadvantages everyone's scores, and is easy to prevent if you know it is coming.

Ignoring quieter members of the group. You are being assessed on how you operate as a team. That includes whether you notice and involve the people who are not yet contributing.

Getting too focused on the outcome. The how matters as much as the what. A mediocre conclusion reached collaboratively will often outscore a strong conclusion reached through dysfunction.

Abandoning your own contributions in an attempt to be collegiate. Genuine collaboration includes making sure your own ideas are heard. Deferring to everyone else is not teamwork, it is passivity, and it scores just as poorly as domination.

Want to prepare for the full assessment centre?

The Future Trainee Academy includes a dedicated section on assessment centres from a recruiter who spent years running them at Mayer Brown, covering group exercises, case studies, and how to perform consistently across a full assessment day. Free to access.

For 80+ real interview questions across every category used by leading law firms, see the Interview Question Bank.