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I would not be surprised if this sort of exaggerated lie rolled off my tongue in a training contract interview. 

These interviews, as I am sure you will appreciate, are draining to say the least. One hour to prove that you are better than the other poor contractless souls sitting in the room next door sweating through a verbal reasoning, that you, above all others, have what it takes to be a brilliant lawyer. And this process pivots on you ticking every single box on that laminated list engrained in your interviewers head.

The list goes along the lines of: committed, driven, impeccably presented, impressive grades, impressive commercial awareness, impressive work experience, impressive answer to what sort of dog you would be and why, and of course, not forgetting the quintessential quality of “thinking outside the box”. 

If law students do not have it tough enough, we then have to convince “Sarah” from HR that we most certainly do think outside the box, at all times in fact, and sometimes we are so far away from the box that I am quite convinced it looks as small as a sugar cube!

I am of course sensibly aware of the need to demonstrate innovation and lateral thinking, but this “box” phrase I do most detest. Our modern day business jargon is pretty unattractive at the best of times; “blue sky thinking”, “singing from the same hymn sheet”, “pushing the envelope”, “hypertasking” and so on. But the one about the thinking and the box and the not being inside it is one riddled with satire in the context of law applications. 

Thinking outside the box originated from a traditional topographical puzzle called the “Nine Dots Puzzle”. Damn those little dots. The challenge is to connect the dots by drawing four straight continuous lines and never lifting pencil from paper.

The puzzle, to explain, is only difficult because we imagine a boundary around the edge of the dot array, a vision that gives us a handicap in the dot connecting process. Moving this puzzle analogy into the business arena of today (although personally I find business law much more puzzling than this little dot predicament), management consultancy units have latched onto this rather cliché catchphrase as being the essence of success.

And believe me, the consultancy websites wring this phrase for everything it's worth, leaving one feeling slightly nauseous with statements such as “turning mediocre solutions into a great solution”, “a willingness to explore” and having an “unharnessed openness to do different things and to do things differently”. 

I have a grievance with the concept behind thinking outside the box and the training application process. I feel a sting of paradox between myself and the box. Applicants are increasingly drowning in the fierce competition of Sponsorship. The tsunami influx of young minds wishing to convert to law has reached unprecedented levels, and why not - law is a fantastic vocation.

Law claws its way further up the popularity stakes as a direct ramification of bleak recession depression, with spurned bankers quickly swapping their calculators for statute and find themselves filling out their Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) forms. And with the economic downfall comes the reaction from the pragmatic law firms, namely the reduction of trainee intakes (unfortunately it appears that future trainees are not “singing from the firm's hymn sheets” quite yet).

This situation leaves even the most confident of applicants feeling the cold sweat of despair, even if it is just for a short time. Whether you agree with this or not, and harsh it may sound, if your studies be fruit, where lies the yield if you have no place to go and practice? 

How I got onto fruit I do not know, but my point is that the growing pressure everyone is under leads to conformity. We all know the process, we all know what to answer, how to answer and what to ask and not ask. Fitting the mould that the firm has required you to be is the name of the game.

From my experiences of assessment days and vacation schemes, I feel it's true to say that the majority of applicants are of high calibre (so much so that I confess I once contemplated taking an incidental opportunity and locking that toilet door and the girl inside with it). Cheap tactics aside, I believe that, in light of the high quality of most applicants, I am right in saying that most of us have the ability to think laterally.

I don’t believe many still remain within the “box”. So there we go, thinking outside the box can be perhaps labelled conventional, and the phrase is turned on its head. The “outside” unconventional thinking has suddenly lost its vogue and become convention (which goes against the original meaning of the phrase entirely). How can we therefore “think outside the box” when we are such conformists? Do we now need to start thinking inside the box perhaps?

P.s the correct answer to the dog question was a Labrador. 

Frances Pattison 

Graduate from BPP Holborn

30-09-2009