Updated September 2026
The tests between you and a training contract
Elite firms receive thousands of applications per intake, and the online assessment stage removes most of them before a human reads anything. The battery is remarkably consistent across firms: a critical thinking test — most famously the Watson Glaser — plus verbal reasoning, a situational judgement test, and increasingly a strengths or personality questionnaire. All of it is trainable, and the score gap between a first sitting and a practised one is largest on exactly the test firms weight most. Persona Prep is an independent practice platform, not affiliated with any firm or test publisher; we train the format families, never the original items.
The four stages, and what each one actually rewards
Watson Glaser critical thinking
The signature law-firm screen: inferences on a five-point scale, hidden assumptions, deduction, interpretation and argument evaluation — about 40 items, 30 minutes. Firms use it because it is the closest a test gets to legal reasoning: conclusions from the text and nothing but the text.
How to prepare: Train the passage-only reflex until it is automatic. Every family punishes imported knowledge differently — an inference that is true in the real world but unsupported by the passage is FALSE here.
Verbal reasoning (True / False / Cannot say)
A short business or legal-adjacent passage and a statement to judge. The same evidential discipline as the Watson Glaser, run at pace — many firms use it as the earlier, cheaper sift.
How to prepare: The third button is the whole test: 'Cannot say' catches everyone who confuses plausible with stated. Timed practice makes the distinction reflexive.
Situational judgement tests
Client-confidentiality dilemmas, supervisor conflicts, deadline collisions — with responses to rank or rate. Keys reward client care, escalation over improvisation, and commercial awareness.
How to prepare: Answer as a junior professional who protects the client and the firm, not as a hero. Consistency across scenarios is read.
Personality and strengths questionnaires
Forced-choice or Likert inventories that map you against the firm's profile — resilience, conscientiousness, and how you handle pressure feature heavily.
How to prepare: Know your real profile before test day and answer from behaviour, not aspiration. The scoring cross-checks the same trait across many rephrasings, and interviews probe the result.
Why the Watson Glaser decides more than anything else
Firms that use it typically screen well above the median of a graduate or legal norm group, and they re-test at assessment centres — so a lucky or heavily coached one-off score that cannot be reproduced under supervision is worse than none. What moves the score reliably is format discipline: knowing the five answer scales cold, and holding the courtroom rule on every item — strike from the record everything the passage did not put there. That discipline is exactly what timed practice builds.
Our Watson Glaser style practice test runs all five families on the real scales, with a worked solution on every generated item and a 1–9 stanine rank so you can see where you sit before a firm does.
The full report, live
Your profile, judged against the role's target zones
All 15 dimensions · role-specific targets · question-level risks
Unlock my full reportTrain the whole law-firm battery in one place: critical thinking on the real scales, timed verbal reasoning, and a full personality run with a consistency indicator. Free to start, no card.
Start free practice