Bates White Case Interview: 25 to 40 Minutes, Three Parts

What the firm says its case contains

The case interview tips page opens with the purpose in one line: "Our case interviews are designed to simulate the real-world challenges we solve for clients." It then gives the window as 25 to 40 minutes and lists three sample topics.

Those three topics are the fastest read on what this firm is. Bundling two medical products. A merger between two ice cream chains and its effect on pricing. A cartel overcharging for digital music players. All three are applied microeconomics questions attached to a dispute.

Two of the firm's own phrasings are more useful than they look. On brainstorming it says to "Use the phrasing of the question to guide your response," with the example of a question asking whether something is beneficial, harmful, or both. That is an instruction to answer all the parts a question contains. And on calculations it warns about "misplacing zeroes (e.g., millions instead of thousands)," which is the single most common way a correct method produces a wrong figure.

On the last part, the firm writes that "reasoning matters more than a "correct" answer." Read alongside the calculations advice, the position is consistent: show the arithmetic, and be judged on how you got there.

Two processes, and only one has a case

The bachelor's and master's track and the doctoral track are different exercises, and the firm publishes both.

A doctoral candidate rehearsing cases here is rehearsing for somebody else's process. The firm asks for a 90-minute seminar on your own research and does not mention a case once on that page.

The summer consultant page prints the same two-round structure as the full-time page, word for word. The internship runs ten weeks and includes a case study assignment the firm describes as solving a client challenge from start to finish, analyzing data, building economic models, and presenting findings to senior leadership.

That page also lists free open info sessions and case interview workshops held on Zoom, three of them on 9, 16 and 23 September 2026 from 5:30 to 7:00 pm Eastern. Sessions of that kind recur, so the page is worth checking before a campaign rather than after.

The case the firm gives away, and what it teaches

Bates White publishes a full worked case on its example case page. A phone maker called TalkTek alleges its battery suppliers fixed prices across 2019 and 2020. The firm states the target quantity plainly: "Damages are the difference between the actual price that TalkTek paid for batteries and the "but-for" price they would have paid but-for the alleged price-fixing."

Four questions follow, each with a hint and an answer. The second asks you to read a price table, infer a trend, and compute an overcharge. The published answer: "If you assume that, instead, prices should have continued decreasing at a rate of $0.50 a year, then TalkTek paid $3.50 more per battery than it otherwise would have in 2019 and 2020."

The third question is the one that separates candidates. Costs in those two years ran above trend because of a natural disaster. The firm's answer: "overpayment per unit was $1.50 instead of $3.50, since the actual price per battery of $3.50 above the but-for price is offset in part by the costs for 2019 and 2020 being $2.00 above the trend." That arithmetic checks out, and it more than halves the claim.

The fourth question hands you the elasticity branch. If demand for TalkTek phones is inelastic, the higher battery price gets passed to consumers and consumers are harmed. If demand is elastic, manufacturers may absorb it. The published answer gives both branches and commits to neither.

An overcharge, carried through to a total

The firm's published case stops at a per-unit figure. The volumes and totals below are ours, added so you can see what happens when a per-unit number meets a quantity.

The setup. Take the firm's own structure. The but-for price falls $0.50 a year. In 2019 the but-for price is $11.00 and TalkTek pays $14.50. In 2020 the but-for price is $10.50 and it pays $14.00. The raw overcharge is $3.50 in both years. Costs ran $2.00 above trend in both, so the adjusted overcharge is $1.50. TalkTek bought 40 million batteries in 2019 and 44 million in 2020.

Move one: the unadjusted claim. 40 million times $3.50 is $140 million. 44 million times $3.50 is $154 million. Total $294 million.

Move two: the adjusted claim. 40 million times $1.50 is $60 million. 44 million times $1.50 is $66 million. Total $126 million.

Move three: say what the gap shows. The cost adjustment removes $168 million, which is 57 percent of the claim, and it does so with a single line of reasoning about input costs. That is what the third question was testing.

Move four: split the harm. Suppose the phone maker passes 60 percent of the $1.50 to consumers. Consumers bear $0.90 per phone and the maker absorbs $0.60. On the 2019 volume that is $36 million to consumers and $24 million to the manufacturer, and $36 million plus $24 million is $60 million, the same year one total as before.

That last check matters more than it looks. Pass-through decides who was harmed and by how much each. It does not change the size of the overcharge, and a candidate who lets the total move when splitting it has made an error the interviewer will catch.

The four dimensions we put on a calculation

Bates White publishes no marking scheme. The hundred points below are ours, taken from the code that runs our grader, and the firm has never seen them.

Six errors that cost Bates White candidates a round

1. Preparing cases for a doctoral interview. The published doctoral process has no case. It has a 90-minute seminar on your own paper, and interviews across the firm.
2. Skipping the published case. It carries the firm's own hints and its own answers, and the third question is a step most candidates would not think to take.
3. Answering half a question. The firm tells you to use the phrasing of the question, and its example is a question asking for beneficial, harmful, or both. Answering one of the three loses the other two.
4. Doing the arithmetic silently. Both the calculations advice and the conceptual advice ask you to show support. A right number with no visible path scores badly here.
5. Stopping at the number. The third part of every case is a conceptual discussion. A candidate who computes and falls silent skips a third of the exercise.
6. Ignoring the workshops. The firm runs free open case interview workshops on Zoom and prints their dates. Attending one is the cheapest preparation available for this firm.

Our practice hub shows what else sits here for a specific firm, and the behavioral practice covers the second round, which the firm says carries behavioral interviews in the plural.

What Bates White does not publish

How many interviewers you meet. Neither round names a headcount, and the doctoral page says interviews "with employees from across the firm" without counting them.

How many cases per round. The firm writes "Case interview" in the singular for each round and does not confirm the count.

Who runs the case, and at what grade. Not stated anywhere.

Any pay figure. No salary appears on the tips page, the two track pages, the openings page or the main careers page.

What replaces the doctoral seminar when it is waived. The page says it may not be required for candidates with prior work experience and stops there.

Whether an online test exists. Nothing we read mentions one. That is not evidence none exists.

A marking scheme, a passing bar, an acceptance rate or a class size. None of these appears on any page.

If your invitation email contradicts anything here, the invitation is current and this page is not. Write to us with what you saw and the date, and we will read it back against the firm's pages before changing a word.

What changed on this Bates White page

Mistakes are logged here with their date rather than smoothed out of the text above.

29 September 2026. The previous version, 274 words long, said the firm's screening steps could not be described. The firm publishes them three times, once per track, and it publishes a complete worked case beside them. The reason they had been missed is small and worth recording: the site's navigation uses single-quoted link attributes, so an extractor looking only for double quotes finds none of the careers subpages.

29 September 2026. The previous version treated one process as covering all candidates. There are two, and the doctoral one contains no case interview at all. That distinction now sits in the second section.

29 September 2026. The four math weights are named as ours at the point where the chart appears. Where we point at the firm's published advice as support for one of them, the page says the connection is our inference. The worked overcharge totals, the workshop dates and the track table are all new.