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Judge Yourself

Practice for judicial selection

Take the bench before selection day.

Judge Yourself rehearses the exercises in a Judicial Appointments Commission selection day: role plays in which you are the judge, situational questions and the skills interview. Afterwards you get a written report against the Judicial Skills and Abilities Framework, with the moments that mattered quoted back to you.

Sign in with your invitationHow it works

Being built now. It will open by invitation for a small pilot; nothing on this site is available yet.

Licensing appeal

Practice hearing

Illustration of a practice hearing: a clock showing fourteen minutes thirty-two seconds left, three tiles for the appellant, you as judge, and counsel for the council, who is speaking, with a caption of what he is saying.

What you can practise

  • Role play

    Read the papers against the clock, then sit as the judge for twenty minutes while two parties argue, interrupt and test your control of the hearing. Close with a reasoned decision before time is called.

    Fee-paid roles: Recorder, Deputy District Judge (civil and Magistrates' Courts), fee-paid tribunal and employment judges, Deputy High Court Judge.

  • Situational questions

    A panel puts difficult situations from the life of a salaried judge, follows up on your answers and may ask for a short judgment.

    Salaried roles, from District and Employment Judge to the High Court.

  • Interview

    A three-member panel works through the skills framework, asks for specific examples, presses on vague or recycled ones, and stops answers that run long.

    Every legal role.

  • Feedback on your self-assessment

    Upload your own application and self-assessment. You get feedback on gaps, on examples that need more of your own reasoning and outcome, and on what an interview panel may explore. It never writes your examples for you.

    Before you submit, or after it while you prepare for interview.

How the feedback is built

Grounded in the JAC’s published reports

Scenarios follow the patterns the JAC describes in its published reports on past exercises: the unrepresented party, the unexpected application, the interruption that tests your control.

Graded against the framework

Each skill gets a practice grade, outstanding to insufficient evidence, tied to the framework’s indicators and to quotations from your own session that you can check.

One priority, then the rest

The report leads with the single change that would help most, shows what it would sound like, and invites you to try again. Every other point follows, briefly.

What this is, and what it is not

Judge Yourself is a practice tool made by Lextrapolate Limited. Its role plays, situational questions and interviews are simulations based on published JAC guidance and on reports of past selection exercises. They do not predict what any future exercise will contain, and the grades are a practice indication, not a forecast of any decision. How you prepare and how you perform are your own responsibility. Judge Yourself is independent of the Judicial Appointments Commission and the judiciary, and is not endorsed by or associated with either.

The JAC's guidance on artificial intelligence applies to you. Use Judge Yourself to practise and to get feedback on writing that is your own. It will not write or rewrite your examples. Never upload JAC selection material (pre-reading, scenarios, test or selection-day papers), and never use Judge Yourself during a test, selection day or interview.

Read the JAC’s own guidance on artificial intelligence (opens in a new tab).