Office of the Parliamentary Counsel jobs

Subutai

I've applied for a job as Assistant Parliamentary Counsel. I've been invited to a test on Thursday, which aims to assess my "legal skills". I'm a practicing solicitor, but not sure what the test is likely to involve and the Public Appointments Service haven't shed any light on the issue.

Has anyone else applied? Or better yet, sat similar tests before and willing to share their experiences. Should I be getting ready to resit the FE1s? 😱

Peregrinus

They're going to focus on legal skills, not legal knowledge, and (I'm guessing) in particular on skills relevant to drafting - so problem analysis, spotting legal issues, general awareness of how legislation works, legal writing (with a focus on clarity, comprehensibility, precision, avoidance of ambiguity).

(On edit: A few years ago I applied for a drafting position in another common-law jurisdiction. They gave me a sample provision establishing, regulating the membership of, and conferring functions on, a statutory board, which contained a number of, um, less that optimal drafting characteristics, and they have me half-an-hour to look at it. They weren't looking for a highly-polished finished draft; just for comment on the sample draft that showed the candidate had an understanding of what might need to be addressed in such a project, and suggestions as to how parts of it might have been done differently. It was all fairly informal. But of course it could be quite different in the Irish Parliamentary Counsel's office.