Five years on from the introduction of the Solicitors Qualifying Examination, how is it working in practice? Having interviewed and recruited aspiring solicitors throughout this period, is the new route genuinely serving the people it was designed to help?
A pattern has emerged in recruitment rounds. Candidates arrive having passed both stages of the SQE and completed their qualifying work experience (QWE). Yet they struggle with things that ought to be second nature: how a client account operates, what a conflict of interest looks like in practice and the basic mechanics of professional conduct. These are not optional refinements. They are the core professional and ethical standards that every qualified solicitor is expected to meet from day one.
To be fair to the SQE, it is not simply a multiple-choice paper. SQE2 assesses practical skills through 16 stations, including advocacy and client interviewing, all of which are marked by qualified solicitors. The assessment has genuine breadth. The difficulty is that breadth is not the same as depth. The Legal Practice Course demanded months of full-time study, taught by practitioners with real experience of the work; many of us gave up employment to get through it. That immersion built knowledge that lasted. The SQE can be prepared for more flexibly and at a candidate’s own pace.
Much the same can be said of the QWE framework. The training contract required four seats within a single firm, each supervised and documented, with a training diary and formal sign-off at every stage. Seats spanned contentious and non-contentious work; no trainee could qualify without exposure to litigation. It was also competitive: trainees understood that performing well was the route to being kept on, which concentrated the mind considerably. Under the current rules, the SRA does not prescribe which practice areas must be covered. There is no obligation to include contentious work at all. A candidate can qualify having spent two years in one transactional discipline, confirmed by any solicitor, without ever having encountered a dispute. When juniors join firms as newly qualified solicitors, the gap between expectation and reality can be striking, which is not their fault. That gap, however, falls squarely on the employer to bridge. Firms are being asked to absorb a level of foundational training that was never their responsibility. In a busy practice, that is no small thing. The reasonable expectation has always been that a newly qualified solicitor arrives with a working foundation of legal knowledge and professional understanding, something the firm can then build on through experience and mentoring. When that foundation is absent, the burden of providing it falls on already stretched senior solicitors. This expectation is becoming increasingly difficult to meet. The architects of the SQE do not appear to have fully considered this.
There is also a broader reputational question that the profession has been reluctant to confront. The SQE has made it considerably more accessible for foreign-qualified lawyers to obtain the title of English solicitor. In theory, there is nothing wrong with that. English law has always attracted international talent and our courts benefit from diverse expertise. Yet a qualification title without commensurate grounding in English legal practice (in the culture of client service, the nuances of professional conduct, the texture of how disputes actually proceed) risks creating a misleading impression. It can suggest that becoming an English solicitor is a largely administrative exercise, rather than the product of years of training, supervision and professional development. That impression does not serve the public or the profession.
The question I keep returning to is whether we are failing candidates, not through any ill intent, but structurally. Preparation courses for the SQE are not cheap, so qualifying costs remain high even as the framework has loosened. Meanwhile, the regulatory environment has moved in the opposite direction. The Solicitors Regulation Authority’s conduct expectations have tightened, not relaxed, and anti-money laundering requirements have become much more demanding. Barely a week passes without a report of a firm facing sanctions, and the SRA has made clear it will not treat breaches lightly. A newly qualified solicitor stepping into practice today faces a more exacting compliance landscape than their predecessors did, with less structured preparation.
Qualifying as a solicitor was never meant to be straightforward. The responsibility the role carries demands that the entry standard means something. Some candidates now pass their assessments and arrive in practice visibly surprised by what is expected.
A determined candidate can still build an excellent foundation, but they must be more deliberate about it than the rules require. My advice is to treat QWE as an opportunity, not a formality. Seek placements where you are handling real files, speaking directly with clients, and seeing matters progress. Make sure you gain exposure to contentious work. If a placement does not offer that, it is worth reflecting on whether it is genuinely preparing you for practice.
Invest time in commercial awareness beyond the syllabus. Read the business press, follow the sectors you hope to work in, and try to understand how firms generate revenue and how clients measure the value of legal advice. The best junior lawyers understand instinctively that a correct legal answer and a useful one are not always the same thing.
Seek out a mentor. Find a senior solicitor who will give you honest feedback and whose practice you can learn from. That kind of relationship, more than any exam, is what turns a candidate into a lawyer.
Yulia Barnes is managing partner at Barnes Law Associates, London
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