Freshfields lawyers' quiz questions

Freshfields lawyers' quiz answers

They are among the City's best and brightest, plucked from Britain's finest universities and rewarded with salaries rising to almost £70,000 after only two years - but does the latest intake of junior lawyers at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, one of the City's oldest and most respected law firms, know what “short selling” is? Can they identify the chief executive of Tesco, one of their biggest clients? Apparently not.

A group of trainee lawyers at the world's third-largest law firm failed to answer even half of the questions correctly in a quiz on recent business events, according to a leaked internal e-mail. The young lawyers scored an average of 43 per cent in the quiz, which was delivered at the end of a group training day at the firm's Fleet Street offices. The highest individual score was 84 per cent.

Among the 15 questions, respondents were asked to cite the UK's central bank interest rate, for a score of one point, and to compare it with corresponding rates in the United States and the eurozone, for a further two points. Freshfields is well known as the law firm to the Bank of England.

Other questions were less taxing and included identifying the investor known as the “Sage of Omaha” (Warren Buffett) and the provenance of abbreviations such as CDS (credit default swaps), KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co) and HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland).

Other questions asked the lawyers to identify as many of the G20 countries as possible and to cite the companies that leading businessmen such as Rupert Murdoch, Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou and Sir Stuart Rose were associated with.

An e-mail sent to the trainees later by an unnamed graduate recruitment officer called for an improvement in their general business knowledge and suggested that they would be tested again. “A person who claims to be a commercial lawyer but who doesn't have much of a handle on what is going on in the commercial world isn't, in the end, going to be fantastically credible to clients,” it said.

The e-mail, which was published yesterday on RollOnFriday, the legal community website, urged the lawyers to make a habit of reading the business pages of a “reputable” daily newspaper.

A spokesman for Freshfields said that the test had been designed to highlight the importance of a broad financial knowledge in a “light-touch” way. However, the poor performance of Freshfields' junior recruits will amuse other sectors of the City that have long regarded lawyers as lacking commercial awareness.

Matthew Rhodes, director of RollOnFriday , said: “To be fair, the senior partner himself probably couldn't name the official bank rate on September 4, but for £39,000 a year he might expect his future trainees to know who makes their underwear.”

Freshfields recruits about 100 trainee lawyers every year in its London office. It is regarded as among a handful of the most sought-after firms in the City to work for, requiring at least a 2.1 degree, in addition to a “good range of achievement” in other areas.

Trainees begin on salaries of £39,000, rising to £66,000 in two years after they have completed their professional qualifications and reaching more than £90,000 within five years, plus bonuses. Last year, 46 per cent of Freshfields' trainees were women and 18 per cent were from ethnic minorities. The firm has made significant efforts to improve the diversity of its intake.

Gary Slapper, Professor of Law at the Open University Business School, said that most lawyers now appreciated the need for broad commercial knowledge, adding: “A commercially ignorant lawyer is like a taxi driver without a sense of direction.”