I applied online. I interviewed at A&O Shearman (Washington, DC) in May 2026
Interview
The interview was two stages and took roughly a month or so. The first stage was introductory and the second stage contained an assessment, which I found to be fair. The team overall was very responsive throughout the process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What my day-to-day looks like and whether I have familiarity handling conflicts through the entire life cycle of the request.
Comfortability talking with partners and clearing conflicts.
Familiarity with conflicts databases.
How I prioritize requests with competing deadlines.
Other personality and competency based questions.
The assessment portion of the second interview was more robust with a hypothetical case where I had to run the team through my conflicts analysis process. It was about issue spotting, walking through the potential clearances and advising whether the request poses moderate to high risk.
Was promised feedback from department head after interview. They told me they were currently busy with internal changes at the time of the interview so I felt that I was not prioritized during the interview process, but at the end after they promised to give feedback, they forgot.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How does your past experience apply to a scenario within our processes in house ? * They proceeded to give an example of how they work.