Best interview questions for your hiring process
Legal Advisor Interview questions
A Legal Advisor (sometimes called a Legal Counsel or Legal Consultant) provides legal counsel and services to companies or individual clients. Their role is incredibly versatile as they often act as the main point of contact on all legal matters. Whether helping solve disputes or drafting legal documents, the Legal Advisor assists a company to help limit their risk of facing lawsuits.
A Legal Counsel can have a huge impact on your business, so it’s important that you ask the right Legal Advisor interview questions while hiring to ensure you find the right person for the job. Below, we’ve listed over 15 of the best Legal Counsel interview questions to help you find that special candidate.
When hiring a Legal Consultant, these are the qualities you should be looking for:
- Thorough understanding of the law and legal terminology (preferably specialising in your industry)
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Ability to translate complex legal issues into easy to understand language
- Great organisational skills and the ability to work independently as well as in a team
Interviewing a Legal Advisor
Before you sit down for the first interview with potential candidates you will need to prepare the right questions to ask them. Since the person in this role can have such an impact within your organisation you should have several job-specific questions ready to test their skills.
You will find a list of such interview questions below. Do bear in mind though that these questions are to be asked early on in the interview process. Further down the line, you should ask Legal Advisor interview questions for more experienced candidates.
How to open the Legal Advisor job interview
Job interviews can be scary. There’s a good chance your candidate is nervous at the start of the interview, which can knock their confidence and give you an inaccurate impression of how they are as a person. So helping them feel as comfortable as possible during the interview is in everyone’s best interest.
Luckily, it often isn’t that difficult to help ease the candidate’s nerves. Start the interview with a few light-hearted questions to help them settle in. For example, ask them how they travelled to the interview (if the interview is held at your office) or simply ask them how their day has been so far. A positive opener to the conversation can go a long way.
Best interview questions for your hiring process
See our Legal Advisor Job Description hereFor the interview
A positive opener to start
What has your career path been like so far?
What do you enjoy most about being a Legal Advisor?
Why did you decide to become a Legal Counsel?
Behavioral Questions
Tell me about a time when you couldn’t solve a problem yourself and you had to seek a second opinion from another legal professional. How did you handle the situation?
What has been the most difficult case/project you worked on? Explain what strategy you used to resolve it.
This is both an opportunity to show their problem-solving skills as well as showcase how experienced they are in their job and the projects they have worked on.
Give me an example of when you worked well in a team.
A Legal Advisor tends to have a consulting role in a company. As such, they can sometimes be a bit disconnected from the rest of the team. This question helps you get an understanding of how the candidate would work with the rest of your team.
Can you tell me about a time when you made a decision you later regretted? How would you have handled it differently?
We all do things we regret or make decisions that later on we wish we handled differently. This question helps you understand how the candidate deals with such a situation.
Soft Skills
In this role, you need to be able to translate complex legal topics into easy to understand language to share with the team. Can you explain how you would normally go about doing this?
This is an important skill for a Legal Advisor to have. In their role, they often need to be able to explain complex legal issues in easy to understand language. This question gives you insight into how they would go about providing legal advice to colleagues/clients.
Can you give me an example that shows your attention to detail?
A Legal Advisor is tasked with drafting contracts and other legal documents. Forgetting to include the right information or making a mistake can directly result in negative consequences. That’s why attention to detail is one of the most important skills for a Legal Counsel to have.
What do you do to keep up to date with the latest developments in the field?
As the main legal person in your business, you want to ensure that they are always up to date with the latest legislative developments.
If you were to make a mistake when drafting a document with a sharp deadline, how would you handle this situation?
Again, mistakes happen. It’s normal. Seeing how the candidate handles such a situation and uses their problem-solving skills, especially when under pressure from a deadline, is a great way to tell if they will be a good fit in your company.
Hard Skills
Why would you like to work as a Legal Advisor for our industry? What attracted you to our industry?
A Legal Advisor is often not bound to a specific industry. Asking them why they would like to work in your industry gives you an idea of how much they already know about your company and the industry you operate in.
Have you ever worked on a harassment suit at a company? Can you tell me a bit more about how you solved this issue?
A harassment suit can be a difficult issue to solve. This question taps into the candidate’s problem-solving skills, as well as how they deal with a sensitive topic.
Can you tell me about your level of experience in creating supplier contracts?
This question is aimed at testing their job-specific skills and experience.
What further skills do you possess that you believe make you a great Legal Advisor?
This question gives the candidate an opportunity to brag. It shows you their strengths, what they’re most confident in, as well as what experience they have.
Operational / Situational Questions
Imagine we ask you for legal counsel on how to handle firing a certain team member, but you do not agree with our reasoning to fire that person. What do you do?
This question gives you a sense of how the candidate would deal with disagreements in the workplace and performing tasks that they actually don’t want to perform.
You’ve prepared a contract and the client just returned the countersigned version. You have a final look through and notice you’ve made a significant mistake in one of the clauses. What do you do?
This situation not just requires your candidate to show their problem-solving skills but also taps into their honesty and integrity at work.
You have been instructed to finish a contract by the end of the week so the client has the weekend to go through it. It’s Friday afternoon and you realise you won’t be able to finish it on time if you want to ensure everything is 100% perfect. What do you do?
Again, this question helps you find out how the candidate solves problems. It also shows you if and how they own up to their mistakes.
Start hiring and prepare your interview
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Sometimes a Legal Advisor won’t know how to solve an issue, which means they need to seek counsel from someone else. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s important to find out how your candidate deals with such a situation.