Should you test legal writing and skills before you hire?

A writing sample shows you a candidate's chosen best: work they picked, had time with and probably polished — perhaps with a reviewer's help before it ever reached you.

A timed legal writing exercise shows you the rest.

How they read an unfamiliar file, how they organize an answer, and whether the work holds up when the prompt, the file and the deadline all come from your firm.

Design the exercise from the seat, not from a template.

Give every candidate competing for the seat the same mock file from your practice area, the same prompt and the same window, and say what form the answer should take — a short case summary, an email to a mock client, an outline of a motion.

Then grade on the criteria the work is actually judged on when the firm does it: accurate reading of the material, organization, plain explanation and instructions followed.

Keep the exercise on a mock file rather than anything on your docket.

A live matter turns the test into drafting on a real client's problem, and it hands the firm work it could actually use — which is the pay question the last section takes up.

A mock file also gives every candidate the same starting material, which is what makes the results comparable.

A writing exercise pairs naturally with the attorney interview questions you ask in the room: the exercise shows how a candidate writes, and the interview shows whether their judgment holds up out loud.

For seats where writing is the core of the work, the two together tell you more than either alone.

A drafting test answers the question a resume cannot: whether a candidate can take instructions and turn them into a usable document.

Build the exercise from the documents the seat will actually produce — correspondence, a chronology of a mock file, a memo to file, a discovery-support task — and grade the output the way the attorneys who rely on it would: accuracy against the material provided, instructions followed, formatting to your spec, and the deadline met.

Short is a feature, not a compromise.

A focused task on a short mock file shows whether a candidate reads carefully, follows instructions and finishes; a multi-hour take-home instead measures endurance and availability, and it walks into the pay question described below.

If the seat includes deadline entries or calendar management, a short docketing exercise on mock dates tests the same instruction-following with higher stakes for error.

Score the drafting test before the conversation, then use your paralegal interview questions to probe what you saw.

The exercise hands the interview something concrete to talk about, and a gap between the work and the answers is worth more than either alone.

A typing test for a legal secretary is easy to give and easy to over-read.

Speed with accuracy matters, but the seat is judged on finished documents: a letter that goes out clean, a pleading formatted to your template, a transcription that needs no second pass.

So test the work, not just raw speed — a transcription exercise from a short mock dictation, or a document built from rough notes into your template, tells you more than a words-per-minute score on its own.

For software, the question is not whether a candidate has used your exact setup — it is whether they can find their way around a new screen.

Have them complete a small task in the systems the seat would touch: create an entry in your case-management or billing software, or format and save a document the way your filings are stored.

Whatever your firm runs, the EEOC's rule for required tests applies to a typing or software exercise exactly as it does to a drafting one — keep every element tied to the seat.

An intake role-play reaches the skill none of the other exercises can: how a candidate talks to a potential client who is worried, disorganized and giving up the facts out of order.

Hand the candidate a mock scenario — a caller with a plausible problem in your practice area — and have a member of your staff play the caller from a script, so every candidate's call starts from the same place.

Score the call on what the seat actually does: the facts captured, whether the candidate listened or filled the silence, how they explained what happens next, and whether the person playing the caller would have felt heard and stayed on the line.

Write the criteria down before the first role-play, the same as you would for a drafting rubric.

A role-play also leaves nothing behind.

No deliverable comes out of it, so nothing about the exercise hands the firm usable work — the pay question the next section takes up — and a scripted scenario keeps candidates comparable without a take-home in anyone's evening.

The pay question starts with one line of federal law: the Fair Labor Standards Act defines employ to include to suffer or permit to work (29 U.S.C.

203(g)).

A candidate who produces real, usable work for the firm — drafting a brief the firm files is the example that matters here — may be an employee owed wages for that work.

A short exercise on a mock file is the safer design: the firm sees the evidence on the candidate without taking work product out of the test.

The research behind this page found no Department of Labor guidance written specifically for unpaid hiring tests, so confirm your take-home design with employment counsel.

The bias rules start from the same place.

Under the EEOC's guidance, if an employer requires applicants to take a test, the test must be necessary and related to the job, and it must not exclude people of a protected group or people with disabilities.

In practice that means the test is finished before the first candidate sees it: the same prompt for everyone competing for the seat, a fixed window, and a written rubric drawn from the job's criteria — decided before you read a submission, not after.

Access is part of the same rule.

The EEOC requires an employer to provide an accommodation a disabled applicant needs to apply for a job — a sign language interpreter is its example — unless the accommodation causes significant difficulty or expense.

Say in the test invitation how a candidate requests an accommodation, and think through what you would grant before the first request arrives, particularly on timed exercises.

Sequencing has its own rule in the states that set one.

California's Fair Chance Act (Government Code 12952) bars employers with five or more employees from asking about conviction history on an application, or otherwise inquiring into or considering it, until after a conditional offer of employment — so in California, when your tests run before a conditional offer, the criminal-history question comes after them, not before.

Your state, city or county may have a fair-chance law this page's research did not reach, so check the sequence where your firm actually hires before you screen.

The discipline carries over to what you ask around the test.

The EEOC's guidance says pre-employment questions should be limited to what is essential to deciding whether a person is qualified, and it warns that questions touching race, sex, national origin, religion or age can be used as evidence of an intent to discriminate unless a business purpose justifies them — federal law does not clearly forbid every such question, which is exactly why to treat them as risky rather than hunting for a list of banned ones.

Keep the interview, the debrief and the reference conversation on the work.

Small firms are not automatically outside these rules.

EEOC protection reaches job applicants as well as employees; Title VII, the ADA and GINA cover private employers with 15 or more employees who worked at least 20 calendar weeks in the current or prior year, and the ADEA covers those with 20 or more employees on the same measure.

State law may reach smaller firms — this page's research did not compile state thresholds — so confirm where your firm sits with employment counsel or your state fair-employment agency.

Skills tests sit one stage inside hiring for your law firm, and the same design rules hold whether the seat is an associate or a receptionist.

Write the rubric from the job, keep the exercise short and on a mock file, and let the test tell you what the resume could not.

Employer information, not legal advice. Skills tests sit inside federal and state employment law — confirm your test design, invitations and screening sequence with employment counsel, and coverage questions with the EEOC or your state fair-employment agency.