The Case Interview Opening Statement, Step by Step

What the first ninety seconds of a case interview has to carry

An opening does three jobs at once, and candidates usually attempt only the first.

It confirms you heard the right question. It commits you to an approach the rest of the conversation can follow. And it tells the interviewer how much scaffolding you need, which changes how they run the next forty minutes.

The ninety-second figure is ours. No firm publishes a target length for an opening, and we say so rather than dressing our own number in someone else's authority. It comes from the shape of the published constraints. Accenture's case workbook gives 45 to 60 minutes for a case interview with 30 to 45 on the case itself, so an opening that runs past two minutes has eaten a measurable share of the analysis.

What one practitioner says about the weight of this moment is worth quoting, with its label attached. In a 2017 interview published by the MIT Consulting Club at web.mit.edu, a Bain consultant described what he listens for: "A strong opening structure is probably the most important thing - having an organized plan of attack that is not derivative, and clearly the interviewees own invention." One person, one year, one office. He is a source for what he listens for, and no firm has published a statement like it.

L.E.K. makes paraphrasing step one, and says what it involves

The firm that publishes the most explicit in-case sequence puts restatement at the front.

L.E.K.'s preparation page at lek.com lists seven numbered steps. The page is short, 1,137 characters in total, and step one is titled Take your time. Its gloss reads: "Listen to the question, repeat or paraphrase to be sure you understand; state your assumptions and restate the facts."

Four separate actions sit in that one line, and they are worth splitting out.

1. Listen to the question. Which means finishing the prompt before starting to plan.
2. Repeat or paraphrase. The cheapest error check available, because it surfaces a misread objective in ten seconds rather than twenty minutes.
3. State your assumptions. Anything you are treating as given, said out loud so it can be corrected.
4. Restate the facts. The numbers you were handed, read back, which also confirms you wrote them down right.

Step two of the same list is Gather your thoughts, glossed as "Jot down preliminary ideas, formulate intelligent questions and devise a coherent approach". So the published order is restate, then plan. Reversing those two is the most common thing we see go wrong, because a candidate who plans first has to defend a structure built on a question they have not confirmed.

Deloitte tells you when to take the notes

One instruction in the corpus is about timing rather than content, and it is the most immediately useful line on this page.

Deloitte's practice tool at usrecruiting.deloitte.com publishes five dimensions, and the second is Strategic framing. Its instruction: "Develop a logical structure and identify assumptions; take notes while the scenario is being read to help you structure your thoughts and think through how you'd like to respond".

Read the clause about timing carefully. The notes happen during the reading. They do not wait for it to end. That changes what the silence after the prompt is for. If the structure has already started forming on paper, the pause is for ordering it. If the page is blank, the pause is for remembering the prompt, and thirty seconds is nowhere near enough.

The same firm's tips page adds the constraint on questions: "Ask questions, but don't use them as a crutch. While it's important to ask clarifying questions, avoid relying on them too heavily. We're interested in how you connect the dots when solving the problem."

Hold that against L.E.K., which makes Ask questions an entire numbered step. Both are published. The two firms have different equilibrium points, and a candidate cannot satisfy both at the extremes. Our reading of the overlap: ask what changes your structure, and answer the rest with a stated assumption. A question about the client's objective changes the structure. A question about the industry usually does not.

Justifying the structure, the opening statement move one firm asks for

Six method steps sit on Oliver Wyman's preparation page at oliverwyman.com: pinpoint the issue, break it down, pick an approach, analyze the issues, use numbers, make a recommendation. Under the third, the page adds a clause no other firm in our corpus publishes: "Show your client why it's better than the alternatives."

That is a fifth move on top of L.E.K.'s four, and it is the one almost nobody does. Candidates present a structure. They do not say what they considered and set aside.

Kearney pushes in the same direction from a different angle, in a Wayback snapshot of its case page at kearney.com: "As you analyze the information you receive, begin with the big picture. Understand the overriding issues, and use them to prioritize and organize issues that have lesser consequences. Try to avoid forcing your solution to fit a standard framework. The only things it needs to fit are the problem, the business, and the objectives."

A structure that fits the problem rather than a template is, by construction, one you can justify. A memorized frame is not, because the reason you chose it is that you memorized it. The justification sentence is therefore a test of whether the structure was built or retrieved, and one firm has told you in advance that it wants to hear it.

A case interview opening statement written out, on a stated prompt

Here is the whole thing, on one prompt, with the four published sources' moves in order.

The prompt. A regional grocery chain with 12 stores has seen operating profit fall. The chief executive wants to know why and what to do. Revenue per store averages 4.2 million dollars.

The opening, as you would say it. So the client runs twelve grocery stores averaging 4.2 million dollars of revenue each, which puts the chain at about 50.4 million dollars of revenue. Operating profit has fallen, and you want a diagnosis and a recommendation. I am assuming we are looking at the last two to three years, and that store count has been stable over that period. Tell me if either is wrong.

I would work this in three branches.

I would start with the gross margin rate, because it can fall with revenue flat, which the prompt does not rule out. Before that, one question: is the fall in absolute profit, or in margin rate?

Why this and not a standard frame. A four-P or a three-C structure would cover the market and miss the cost base, and the prompt names profit rather than growth. That is the justification sentence, and it takes eight seconds.

Check the arithmetic in that opening, because saying a wrong number in the first minute is expensive. Twelve stores at 4.2 million dollars is 50.4 million dollars. Verified by hand on 30 September 2026: 12 times 4.2 is 50.4.

Where Coverage 45 is won

The weights below are ours, read from the grading code in src/lib/grading. No consulting firm publishes a rubric of its own.

Drilling the case interview opening statement on its own

The opening is the single most drillable part of a case, because it needs no interviewer and no data.

1. Take any prompt and say only the opening. Sixty to ninety seconds, out loud, timed. Then stop.
2. Score yourself on five moves. Paraphrase, assumptions stated, facts restated, structure laid out, structure justified. Five out of five is the published bar across L.E.K., Deloitte and Oliver Wyman combined.
3. Write the notes during the read. Have someone read the prompt aloud, or read it aloud yourself into a recording and then play it back once. Deloitte's instruction only works if you rehearse it that way.
4. Rewrite one branch to fit a different business. A grocery chain and a software vendor do not share a cost base. If your structure survives the swap unchanged, it was a template.
5. Run ten prompts and keep only the justification sentences. Read them together. If they are interchangeable, none of them was real.

Our structure drill scores an opening on Coverage, Separation, Depth and Concision separately and names the first correction, and the case structure builder lets you lay out branches before you speak. Both are free and neither needs an account. Neither can tell you whether a branch is the one a partner would have worried about, which is the judgment the client pays for.

For the seven-step sequence in full and what happens after the opening, see hypothesis driven cases. For the close at the other end, see case interview synthesis. For the firm-level detail on L.E.K., see the L.E.K. case interview guide.