Author: Taylor Warfield, Former Bain Manager and interviewer

Last Updated: September 7, 2026

 

The HEC Paris casebook is a free case interview preparation guide published by the HEC MBA Consulting Club that contains 12 full practice cases, 9 industry primers, 57 fit questions, and 32 structuring drills. This guide breaks down exactly what is inside, which parts have aged badly, and how to practice with it so you actually get better instead of just reading.

 

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Key Takeaways

 

The HEC Paris casebook is a strong drilling resource and a mediocre case library, so use it for structure practice and pull your case volume from elsewhere.

You can download the case book here: HEC Paris casebook.pdf

 

• The most circulated version is the Spring 2019 second edition, written by the HEC MBA Consulting Club

 

• It has 12 full cases, and 7 of those were new in the 2019 edition

 

• Best section: the practice drills, with 32 case openings and 13 market sizing prompts

 

• Weakest section: the industry overviews, which still quote 2018 and 2019 trend data

 

• It is one of the only casebooks with a full trainer guide, which makes it valuable for the person giving the case

 

• Cases skew European, with prompts set in Paris, Australia, China, and the aerospace supply chain

 

What Is the HEC Paris Casebook?

 

The HEC Paris casebook is the HEC MBA Consulting Club's case interview preparation guide. The most widely circulated version is the Spring 2019 second edition, which runs eight sections covering the consulting industry, the interview format, nine industry overviews, trainer and trainee guidance, networking, drills, and twelve full practice cases with trainer solutions.

 

The first edition was assembled by the Spring 2017 class. The 2019 edition was edited by Luca Pasotti under club president Jon Wiedeman, both from the S18 cohort, and the introduction credits contributions from dozens of HEC MBA students.

 

One thing the book gets right in its opening pages is honesty about its own limits. It states plainly that reading a casebook is not a substitute for practice and structured learning, then lists shadowing, drills, live cases, and mock interviews with former consultants as the activities that actually build skill. Most casebooks skip that warning entirely.

 

There is a naming problem worth clearing up. HEC Paris also maintains an academic collection of more than 40 faculty-written teaching cases distributed through The Case Centre, and searches for the casebook constantly surface those instead. Those are classroom materials about companies like L'Oreal and LVMH, and they will do nothing for your interview prep.

 

What's Inside the HEC Paris Casebook?

 

The casebook is organized into eight numbered sections. Instruction and drills fill the front, and the 12 cases occupy the entire back half starting on page 57.

 

Section	What it covers	Verdict
1. Introduction	How to use the book, plus an overview of the consulting industry and its generalist, specialist, and internal segments	Skim it. The industry sizing is from 2019
2. The Interview	The three-part interview format and the four steps of a case, plus exhibit handling and the pyramid principle	Still accurate and tightly written
3. Industry Overviews	Nine primers on aeronautical, automotive, banking, FMCG, impact investing, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, private equity, and technology	Structure is useful, data is stale
4. Trainer	How to prepare a case, facilitate it, calibrate difficulty, and deliver structured feedback with a scoring grid	The book's most unusual and most valuable section
5. Trainee	Soft versus hard skills, prep habits to embrace and avoid, and a case practice log template	The practice log alone justifies the download
6. Networking	Finding contacts, outreach etiquette, call preparation, and banks of good and bad questions to ask	Short but sharper than most casebooks
7. Practice	57 fit questions in six categories, 32 case opening drills, 13 market sizing drills, 6 math lessons, and 7 math drills	Highest value per page in the entire book
8. Cases	12 full cases with prompts, information to release on request, exhibits, and suggested solutions	The reason most people download it

 

Section 2 is the cleanest summary of case interview structure in any student-written casebook I have read. It puts the intro and fit portion at 10 to 15 minutes, the case at 30 to 40 minutes, and the wrap-up at 5 minutes, then splits the case itself into clarifying, structuring, analyzing, and recommending.

 

Section 7 is where the book earns its reputation. The six mental math lessons walk through a no-zeros notation habit, base 10 multiplication, breaking problems into pieces, finding a range before dividing, and taking percentages of large and small numbers. Those are the exact five failure points I saw over and over when interviewing candidates at Bain.

 

What Cases Are in the HEC Paris Casebook?

 

The 2019 edition contains 12 cases spanning growth, market entry, mergers and acquisitions, pricing, go or no go decisions, competitive strategy, and investment evaluation. Seven were written fresh for the 2019 edition, which is a higher refresh rate than most club casebooks manage.

 

Case	Case type	Industry	Page
Downstream Oil	Growth	Oil and gas	57
Consultancy	M&A	Consulting	63
Clothing Retailer	Market entry	Retail	68
Printing Co.	Pricing	Consumer goods	73
School	Go or no go	Education	76
Pescador Group	Investment case	Impact investing	81
Ultra Running Ltd.	Growth	Sport	86
Motor Sport	Market entry	Sport	93
Mall Scooters	Go or no go	Retail	112
Technology Takedown	Competitive strategy	Technology	118
Neue Art Gallery	Growth	Arts	126
Sub Product Disposal	Growth	Mining	132

 

Two cases stand out as unusually good. Downstream Oil packs a market sizing question, a stacked bar chart with a critical footnote, and a creativity question into one prompt, which is closer to a real McKinsey case than anything else in the book.

 

Printing Co. is the sleeper. It is labeled a pricing case, but it actually tests whether you understand marginal cost economics in a commodity market, and the correct answer is that the printers are worth zero. Candidates who reach for a memorized valuation template fail it, which is exactly the point.

 

The gaps matter too. There is no profitability case, no cost reduction case, and no operations or capacity case, so a candidate working through case interview types systematically will find three of the most common ones missing entirely.

 

Where Can You Find the HEC Paris Casebook PDF?

 

You can download the case book here: HEC Paris casebook.pdf

The HEC Paris casebook is not published on HEC's public website. The HEC MBA Consulting Club distributes it internally to members through the club drive, alongside a one-to-one case partner platform that pairs students across HEC programs.

 

If you are an HEC MBA student, join the club during orientation and ask for the current edition. The club is listed among the official HEC Paris MBA student clubs and names interview preparedness as one of its two core member services, so the PDF comes with a trainer rotation attached.

 

Admitted students who want materials before orientation should email the club at [email protected]. One email beats an hour of hunting for a file.

 

If you are not at HEC, your options are narrower. The 2019 edition carries an All Rights Reserved notice, and while copies have spread across document sharing sites, the club controls the rights. Asking an HEC contact directly is the clean route, and there are dozens of other MBA consulting casebooks that are openly published and cover the same ground.

 

Keep in mind that HEC Paris has two separate consulting student groups and only one of them writes the casebook. The HEC Consulting Club known as HEC Junior Conseil is the Grande Ecole program's Junior Enterprise, founded in 1971, and it runs paid client projects rather than interview prep.

 

Is the HEC Paris Casebook Good for Case Interview Prep?

 

The HEC Paris casebook is a good drilling resource and a below-average case library. Use it for the trainer guide, the fit question bank, and the 32 opening drills, then get your case volume from casebooks with 15 or more cases each.

 

Here is what it does better than almost any other casebook.

 

• The trainer section: a full guide to preparing, running, and calibrating a case, including a six-area scoring grid covering structure, math, market sizing, creativity, soft skills, and conclusion

 

• The opening drills: 32 prompts you structure and then throw away, which builds the skill that decides most first rounds

 

• The interviewer-led format: every case comes with a trainer script and information to release only on request, matching how McKinsey and Bain actually run cases

 

• The European setting: prompts feature a Paris bar operator, a French government entrepreneurship push, a Perrier acquisition, and an aerospace primer built around Airbus and Bombardier

 

The book is also refreshingly direct about what not to do. Its trainee section warns against getting attached to canned case interview frameworks and against using buzzwords like announcing that a question is a market sizing question, which is advice that most 2019-era casebooks did not give.

 

Now the problems. The industry overviews quote a management consulting market size and digital growth rate from 2018 and 2019 sources, describe a pharmaceutical revenue figure from 2017, and discuss private equity dry powder as a 2018 record. Quoting any of those in a 2026 interview would make you look like you had not read a business publication in seven years.

 

The exhibits are the second problem. Several charts render poorly in circulating PDF copies, and a few case exhibits are described in the trainer notes without a clean version the candidate can look at, which makes practicing charts and graphs harder than it should be.

 

The third gap is scope. The book predates every digital assessment now used in MBB case interviews, so there is nothing on the McKinsey Solve game, nothing on BCG's online assessment, and nothing on one-way video interviews. Its recommended prep platforms are also seven years out of date.

 

How Should You Use the HEC Paris Casebook?

 

Work through the book in the order the club intended: instruction, then drills, then full cases. Reading it front to back like a textbook is the single most common way candidates waste it.

 

1. Read sections 2, 4, and 5 first: budget about 40 minutes to cover the interview format, how to give a case, and how to practice
   
   
2. Build your fit answers: pull 4 or 5 stories that cover the 57 questions in the practice section, since the club's own advice is that a handful of detailed stories map onto hundreds of prompts
   
   
3. Drill 32 openings across four sessions: give yourself 45 seconds per prompt to write a structure, then 2 minutes to present it out loud
   
   
4. Run the math lessons before the math drills: budget 20 minutes for the six lessons, which fix habits that otherwise take weeks of casing to correct
   
   
5. Do the 12 cases live with a partner: one person works from the trainer guide, the other never sees it, and the case runs 20 to 45 minutes
   
   
6. Score every case on the six-area grid: the trainer guide asks for at least 10 minutes of feedback per case, and skipping it turns practice into entertainment
   
   
7. Log every case: date, case name, type, source, trainer, score out of 10, what went well, and what to fix next time

 

That last step is the one almost nobody does. Having coached hundreds of candidates one on one, I can tell you the ones who keep a written case log improve visibly faster, because they stop repeating the same handful of mistakes case after case.

 

Give the fit interview portion real time as well. The casebook front-loads fit at 10 to 15 minutes of every interview, which is a quarter of your total time in the room, and candidates routinely spend 95% of their prep on cases.

 

You also need someone to case with. Finding a reliable case interview practice partner matters more than which casebook you pick, and the HEC club built an internal matching platform for exactly this reason. If you want to compress the learning curve, my case interview course walks you through the full method in as little as 7 days.

 

What Should HEC Paris Candidates Know About Consulting Recruiting?

 

Consulting is still a top-three destination for HEC Paris MBAs, but the share has moved sharply. HEC's 2025 employment report puts consulting at 15% of placements, down from 25% the prior year, with technology at 27% and financial services at 24%.

 

That swing matters for how you prepare. A tighter consulting market means firms interview fewer candidates and cut deeper in first rounds, so the difference between 12 cases of preparation and 40 is the difference between an offer and a ding.

 

The rest of the placement picture is strong. According to HEC Paris employment statistics for the Class of 2025, 75% of graduates accepted offers within three months, 64% took roles outside their home country, and 52% stayed in Europe.

 

If you are targeting Paris offices, the recruiting calendar and language expectations differ from what US casebooks assume. Consulting recruiting in Europe runs on different timelines by country, and many French offices expect working French even when the interview itself is in English.

 

What Are the Best Tips for Practicing With the HEC Paris Casebook?

 

These are the five adjustments that turn the casebook from a PDF you skimmed into practice that moves your score.

 

Tip #1: Score yourself on the trainer grid from day one

 

The six-area grid is buried in section 4, where most candidates never look because they assume it is only for the person giving the case. Print it and hand it to your partner before every single case.

 

Scoring forces specificity. "That felt okay" is useless feedback, while "6 out of 10 on math because you rounded without asking twice" is something you can fix by tomorrow.

 

Tip #2: Do all 32 opening drills before you touch a full case

 

The drills exist so you can practice structuring without spending 40 minutes on a full case each time. Thirty-two structures at three minutes each is under two hours of work.

 

The instruction attached to the drills is the important part: do not answer the question, just define how you would approach it. Candidates who skip this step end up building the same generic tree for every prompt.

 

Tip #3: Redraw the exhibits by hand before you use a case

 

Several charts in circulating copies are hard to read, and squinting at a blurry stacked bar chart teaches you nothing. Spend five minutes redrawing the exhibit on paper before you run the case with a partner.

 

Do the same with footnotes. The Downstream Oil case hides a whole revenue stream in a footnote, and catching that is the actual test.

 

Tip #4: Time-box the market sizing drills to five minutes

 

The 13 market sizing drills range from chewing gum in the US to how many ghosts are in Paris, and the book is explicit that pure sizing questions should be practiced sparingly. Five minutes each, out loud, with a stated approach before you ask for a single number.

 

Sanity check every answer. The casebook's own guidance is to flag your most questionable assumption to the interviewer rather than hope they miss it.

 

Tip #5: Get a former consultant to give you at least three of the cases

 

Peer practice caps out. Your classmate cannot tell you that your recommendation would get you cut off by a partner in round two, because they have never sat on that side of the table.

 

The casebook says this itself in the trainee section, listing mock interviews with former consultants above peer cases in its own hierarchy of prep activities. If you want that feedback, my case interview coaching gives you 1-on-1 sessions with a former Bain interviewer.

 

The HEC Paris casebook rewards the candidates who treat it as a drill manual rather than a reading assignment. Download it, work the openings and math lessons in your first week, then run the 12 cases live and score every one, and pair it with three or four other casebooks so you finish preparation with 40 cases behind you instead of 12.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Is the HEC Paris casebook free?

 

Yes. The HEC MBA Consulting Club produced the casebook as a free resource for its members and never sold it. The document carries an All Rights Reserved notice, so the club controls distribution. HEC students get it through club channels, and copies have circulated widely on document sharing sites.

 

How many cases are in the HEC Paris casebook?

 

The Spring 2019 second edition contains 12 full cases with trainer solutions. Seven of them were new in that edition, and five carried over from the earlier edition. The case section also includes 32 opening drills, 13 market sizing drills, and 7 math drills that are shorter than full cases.

 

Is the HEC Paris casebook good for McKinsey, BCG, and Bain interviews?

 

It is useful but not sufficient. The interviewer-led format and the trainer scoring grid match how McKinsey and Bain run cases, and the opening drills are excellent structure practice. The 12 cases are too few to prepare on alone, and the industry data dates to 2019, so pair it with other casebooks and current firm materials.

 

Is the HEC Paris casebook the same as HEC Paris case studies?

 

No. The casebook is a student-written interview prep document from the HEC MBA Consulting Club. HEC Paris case studies are academic teaching cases written by faculty and licensed through The Case Centre for classroom use. Searching for one often surfaces the other, and they serve completely different purposes.

 

What is the difference between the HEC MBA Consulting Club and HEC Junior Conseil?

 

The HEC MBA Consulting Club is a career club for MBA students that runs case practice and publishes the casebook. HEC Junior Conseil is the Grande Ecole program's Junior Enterprise, a student-run consultancy founded in 1971 that delivers paid client projects. Only the MBA club produces the casebook.

 

How many practice cases should you do before a consulting interview?

 

Plan on 30 to 50 live practice cases with a partner, not cases you only read. The HEC casebook covers 12 of those, so you will need three or four more casebooks to fill out a full preparation plan. Quality matters more than volume, and every case should end with structured feedback you write down.

 

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