For aspiring lawyers navigating the increasingly competitive legal recruitment landscape, psychometric assessments have become an unavoidable hurdle. Commercial Law Academy founder and CEO Jake Schogger delivered a masterclass on conquering these notoriously challenging tests, offering practical strategies drawn from his extensive experience as both a Magic Circle-trained lawyer and career coach.

Understanding the Man Behind the Method

Jake Schogger brings a unique perspective to legal education. Having trained at elite law firm Freshfields before spending years advising start-ups and scale-ups at a boutique firm, he understands the legal profession from multiple angles. What makes his approach particularly resonant is his background as a state school-educated, first-generation university student and lawyer, a journey that gives him insight into the challenges facing many aspiring legal professionals today.

His Commercial Law Academy has emerged as a comprehensive e-learning platform offering 25 expert-led courses designed to demystify every stage of the legal career journey, from applications and interviews to building commercial awareness and navigating professional environments. The masterclass on psychometric assessments represents just one component of this holistic approach to legal career preparation.

Why Firms Rely on Psychometric Testing

Schogger began by addressing a fundamental question that candidates often overlook: why do law firms use these tests in the first place? Understanding the reasoning behind psychometric assessments helps candidates approach them with the right mindset. These tests serve as objective screening tools that allow firms to assess cognitive abilities, critical thinking skills, and logical reasoning across large applicant pools, qualities essential for legal practice but difficult to evaluate through CVs and cover letters alone.

Crucially, all psychometric tests impose time pressure, creating a scenario that mirrors the high-stakes, deadline-driven environment lawyers regularly face. This time constraint isn’t incidental; it’s a deliberate feature designed to assess how candidates perform under pressure.

Mastering Time Management

One of Schogger’s most practical pieces of advice sounds deceptively simple: before starting any test, calculate exactly how much time you have per question. By dividing the total time by the number of questions, candidates can pace themselves appropriately throughout the assessment. This basic arithmetic can prevent the common pitfall of spending too long on early questions and rushing through later ones.

However, time management extends beyond simple division. Schogger emphasised the importance of understanding the test’s navigation functionality before beginning. Some assessments allow candidates to move freely between questions, while others lock previous answers once you proceed. This distinction fundamentally affects strategy. When backward navigation is possible, candidates should avoid lingering on difficult questions. If something doesn’t make sense within 30 seconds, move forward and return to it later with fresh eyes.

An equally important psychological tip: don’t fall into the trap of second-guessing yourself if multiple consecutive answers appear to be the same option. The human brain naturally seeks patterns and variation, but psychometric tests don’t follow these intuitive distributions. Trust your reasoning rather than adjusting answers based on perceived patterns.

Verbal Reasoning: The Lawyer’s Test

Verbal reasoning assessments evaluate a candidate’s understanding of language and ability to apply logic to complex written information, skills that sit at the heart of legal practice. The format typically presents a passage followed by statements that candidates must categorise as true, false, or “cannot say” based solely on the information provided.

The key challenge, Schogger explained, lies in overcoming our natural tendency to apply common sense and general knowledge. Verbal reasoning tests demand that candidates become temporarily myopic, seeing only what the passage explicitly states. His recommended mental approach is powerful in its simplicity: preface every consideration with the phrase “according to the passage.”

This discipline helps candidates avoid several common pitfalls. First, they must resist making assumptions even when conclusions seem obvious. Second, they need to pay meticulous attention to qualifying language, words like “some,” “all,” “almost,” “never,” and “always” can completely change a statement’s truth value. Third, candidates must avoid inferring cause-and-effect relationships unless explicitly stated in the passage.

When passages mention that certain people take specific actions, for instance, candidates cannot assume they know the underlying reasons unless those reasons are stated. Similarly, just because two facts appear in the same passage doesn’t mean one causes the other.

Schogger also suggested creating flow charts to map out the logical relationships within complex passages, a technique that helps visual learners organise information and spot logical connections or gaps more easily.

The Watson Glaser Test: Critical Thinking in Action

While verbal reasoning tests assess language comprehension, Watson Glaser tests focus specifically on critical thinking ability. These assessments are less time-pressured than other psychometric tests, typically allowing around 45 seconds per question, and often permit candidates to move backward and forward through questions.

An important distinction that Schogger highlighted: Watson Glaser tests frequently benchmark candidates against other applicants rather than against an absolute pass mark. This relative scoring system creates additional unpredictability, you might perform well but still not make the cut if other candidates perform exceptionally.

The Watson Glaser format includes several question types, each targeting different critical thinking skills:

Inferences require candidates to determine whether proposed conclusions can be drawn from stated facts. These questions distinguish between statements that are explicitly true, probably true based on common knowledge, explicitly false, probably false, or indeterminate based on insufficient data.

Assumptions test whether candidates can identify what a statement takes for granted. A statement about increasing household income by taking additional work, for instance, doesn’t necessarily assume that expenses have increased, that would be reading too much into the statement.

Deductions assess systematic logical reasoning from facts. If told that all millionaires in cities own multiple cars, and that some but not all city inhabitants own multiple cars, candidates must reason through what can and cannot be definitively concluded without making unsupported leaps.

Interpretations evaluate whether proposed explanations or conclusions legitimately follow from presented information, similar to inferences but focused on explaining rather than merely concluding.

Arguments require assessing whether proposed points are strong or weak in relation to a question. Strong arguments raise important, directly relevant points; weak arguments focus on trivial matters or tangential issues. A statement about employee free time might strongly argue against mandatory breaks if it identifies genuine productivity concerns, but weakly argue if it merely mentions minor inconveniences.

The Hidden Challenge: Unknown Scores

Schogger addressed an uncomfortable reality that many candidates don’t anticipate: firms often never disclose test scores, even after applications are rejected. Candidates may never know whether they failed due to their psychometric performance or other application elements. This opacity can be frustrating, but understanding this likelihood helps candidates manage expectations and avoid obsessing over results they cannot change or even know.

The Path Forward: Practice and Perspective

Perhaps the most important takeaway from Schogger’s masterclass is that success in psychometric assessments comes down to practice and mindset. These tests assess learnable skills rather than innate intelligence. With proper preparation, candidates can significantly improve their performance by familiarising themselves with question formats, developing time management strategies, and training themselves to think in the disciplined, text-bound manner these assessments demand.

The Commercial Law Academy’s approach recognises that psychometric tests represent just one component of legal career preparation. By contextualising these assessments within the broader journey of becoming a lawyer, Schogger helps candidates approach them as skills to develop rather than insurmountable barriers.

For students at City St George’s, University of London and beyond, masterclasses like this one offer invaluable preparation for the realities of legal recruitment. As law firms continue to rely on psychometric assessments to screen candidates, understanding not just what these tests measure but how to approach them strategically becomes essential. With the right preparation and mindset, these once-intimidating assessments become manageable challenges rather than career-ending obstacles.

Shilan Shokohi is a Graduate Entry LLB student with a background in Criminology and Police Studies from Simon Fraser University in Canada. Her academic interests lie in corporate, finance, and contract law, and she is particularly interested in how legal systems shape the ways businesses and individuals interact. Moving to London has given her a new appreciation for how deeply the law influences daily life, from commercial transactions to social structures, and has strengthened her commitment to exploring law in both its theoretical and practical dimensions.