The Five SQE2 Skills Explained With Tiny Worked Examples

Most candidates arrive at SQE2 slightly dazed. You've spent months grinding single-best-answer questions for FLK1 and FLK2, your brain is wired for "pick B, move on", and then someone tells you the next stage has an actor, a stopwatch, and a marker who wants to see you do the law rather than recognise it. It's a genuine gear change. And the terminology doesn't help.

So let's clear something up before we go anywhere near a worked example. People say "the five practice areas of SQE2", and they're right — but there are also five (well, six, depending on how you count) skills, and the two things are not the same. Confusing them is the fastest way to revise the wrong thing.

Skills versus practice areas: two different fives

SQE2 assesses your practical legal skills. The SRA groups these as: Client Interviewing (with the attendance note and legal analysis that follows it), Advocacy, Case and Matter Analysis, Legal Research, and Legal Writing and Drafting. Writing and drafting are set as separate tasks even though they're often bundled together in the same breath, so in practice you'll produce distinct pieces for each.

Those skills are then tested through five practice areas — the legal contexts a newly qualified solicitor is expected to handle:

• Criminal Litigation
• Dispute Resolution
• Property Practice
• Wills and Intestacy, Probate Administration and Practice
• Business organisations, rules and procedures

Think of it as a grid. A skill on one axis, a practice area on the other, and the assessment drops you into a specific box — say, Advocacy in a Criminal Litigation setting, or Legal Drafting in a Property matter. Crucially, the professional conduct and ethics you learned for Legal Services doesn't get its own paper here. It's baked into every task. Miss a conflict of interest during a client interview and you lose marks whatever else you say. For the authoritative current breakdown of tasks and how they map, always check sqe.sra.org.uk — the structure is stable, but the detail is theirs, not mine.

Client Interviewing and the attendance note

This is the one people underestimate. You interview a "client" (a trained actor) for a set time, then step away and produce an attendance note plus a short piece of legal analysis. Two things are being marked at once: how you conduct the meeting, and how well you capture and reason about what came out of it.

The rookie error is treating it like a chat. It isn't. There's a rhythm assessors reward — greet and set the agenda, let the client tell their story without you talking over them, probe the gaps, then summarise and agree next steps. Warmth matters, but structure matters more.

Tiny worked example

Your client, a small café owner, says a supplier delivered a commercial coffee machine that "packed in after three weeks" and now won't return calls. In the interview you'd want to establish: when the contract was made, whether the client is buying as a business, what was said about the machine's condition, and what the client actually wants — a refund, a replacement, or just to vent.

In the attendance note you'd record those facts neutrally and accurately. In the legal analysis you'd flag that satisfactory quality and fitness for purpose are in play, that a business-to-business sale changes the framework compared with a consumer one, and that the client's preferred remedy shapes the advice. Notice what you did not do: you didn't blurt "you'll definitely win" in the room. Managing expectations is itself a marked behaviour.

Advocacy: short submissions, tight structure

Advocacy in SQE2 is not a Rumpole monologue. You get a set of papers, some preparation time, and then you make a focused oral submission to a "judge" — often a bail application in the criminal context, or an interim application in a civil one. You'll usually field a question or two mid-flow.

The examiners are looking for signposting, relevance, and the ability to handle judicial interruption without falling apart. Get the courtesies right ("May it please you"), state what you're asking for in the first fifteen seconds, then give the court reasons in a logical order.

The candidates who do well in advocacy aren't the loudest. They're the ones who know exactly what they're asking the court to do, and can say it in one clean sentence before they've drawn breath.

Tiny worked example

You're applying for bail. Your client is charged with a non-violent offence, has a fixed address, a job, no previous failures to attend, and is willing to accept conditions. Your submission structures itself: state you seek bail, address the objections head-on (risk of absconding — answered by community ties; risk of interference — answered by proposed conditions), then offer a package (residence, reporting, no contact). When the judge cuts in to ask about the employer's knowledge, you answer directly, then return to your thread. Composure under interruption is half the mark.

Case and Matter Analysis: the thinking task

Here you're handed a bundle — correspondence, statements, maybe a contract — and asked to advise on the client's options, the merits, and the sensible next steps. There's no actor. It's you, the papers, and a blank document. The skill is triage: spotting what matters, discarding noise, and reasoning towards a recommendation the client can actually use.

What trips people up is that the "right" answer is rarely a single tidy conclusion. It's a weighing exercise. Assessors want to see that you identified the realistic options, tested each against the facts, and made a defensible call — commercial as well as legal. A client with a technically strong claim but no money to enforce a judgment needs to hear that.

Tiny worked example

Facts: two directors of a small company have fallen out. One believes the other has diverted a contract to a side business. You'd analyse whether there's a plausible breach of directors' duties, what evidence supports it, what the company (rather than the aggrieved individual) can realistically do, and whether litigation is proportionate to the sums involved. Then you'd set out options — internal resolution, a formal demand, or proceedings — with the pros and cons of each. The mark isn't for reciting duties. It's for the reasoning that connects the facts to a course of action.

Legal Research: find it, apply it, write it up

You're given a client problem and asked to research the point, then produce a written answer — usually a note to a supervising solicitor or to the client. The trap is showing off. Nobody wants a literature review. They want the correct source, applied to the facts, with a clear conclusion.

The discipline is source selection: primary legislation and case law first, reputable practitioner materials to navigate, and a note of anything you couldn't resolve. State your conclusion early, then justify it. If the law is genuinely uncertain, say so — a candidate who pretends to a certainty that doesn't exist is a liability, and assessors know it.

Tiny worked example

A client wants to know whether a restrictive covenant on their land — "no building without consent" — still bites when the original benefiting land has been sold off in parts. You'd research how the benefit and burden of covenants run, identify the relevant principles, apply them to who now holds the benefit, and conclude with a practical answer: enforceable, not enforceable, or "we need one more fact before I can tell you". That last option is a legitimate, mark-worthy outcome. Honesty about the limits of your research is part of the competence.

Legal Writing and Legal Drafting: two different animals

People lump these together and then wonder why they lose marks on both. They test different muscles.

Legal Writing is communicating advice — typically a letter or email to a client or another party. The skill is register and clarity: explaining law to a non-lawyer without either patronising them or drowning them in jargon. Structure, plain English, and a clear "here's what I recommend and why".

Legal Drafting is producing or amending a legal document — a clause, a witness statement, a will provision, a notice. Precision is everything. The wording has to do its job with no ambiguity, and it has to be internally consistent.

Tiny worked example — writing

A client buying their first flat asks, worried, "what's a service charge and can it go up?" A strong Legal Writing answer explains in a sentence or two what the charge covers, notes that leases usually allow reasonable increases, flags that they should check the lease's specific mechanism, and ends with a clear next step. No Latin. No lecture. Just useful.

Tiny worked example — drafting

You're asked to draft a simple gift clause in a will leaving a specific sum to a named nephew, with a substitution if he predeceases the testator. The drafting has to name the beneficiary unambiguously, state the sum, and provide cleanly for the "what if he dies first" scenario so the gift doesn't lapse by accident. One vague pronoun and the whole clause becomes arguable. That precision — anticipating the awkward eventuality and closing it off — is exactly what's being marked.

How to actually revise for this stuff

SQE2 rewards reps, not theory. You cannot cram five skills across five practice areas by rereading notes. You have to produce work and get it looked at. A few things that genuinely help:

1. Keep your black-letter law warm. SQE2 assumes you still know the substance you learned for FLK1 and FLK2. You can't draft a will clause you don't understand, or advise on directors' duties you've forgotten. This is where a strong question bank earns its keep — the Ant Law SQE Question Bank is built for FLK1 and FLK2 drilling, but running its business, property, wills and dispute-resolution topics before an SQE2 mock stops the law from going stale under pressure.
2. Time everything. The real assessments are unforgiving on the clock. Practise the attendance note in the actual window, not "whenever you get round to it".
3. Record your advocacy. Watching yourself back is painful and the single most useful thing you'll do. You'll catch the filler words and the wandering structure instantly.
4. Write for a human. Read your client letters aloud. If it sounds like a statute, rewrite it.
5. Bake in conduct. On every task, ask "is there an ethics issue here?" — a conflict, a confidentiality point, a duty to the court. There usually is.

One more thing worth saying, because it calms people down. SQE2 is a competence assessment, not a talent contest. You are not being judged against a courtroom silk. You're being judged against the standard of a day-one solicitor doing a competent, safe job. That standard is reachable with structured practice.

Where SQE2 sits in the bigger picture

Remember the whole route to qualifying as a solicitor in England and Wales: a qualifying degree or equivalent, both SQE1 assessments, SQE2, two years of Qualifying Work Experience, and the SRA's character and suitability requirements. The skills you're rehearsing for SQE2 aren't exam theatre — they're the actual job. Your QWE and your SQE2 prep should feed each other; the attendance note you write at work is the same muscle you'll use in the assessment. For the current requirements and how the pieces fit, the SRA's own guidance at sra.org.uk is the source of truth, and it's worth checking rather than relying on what a forum told you last year.

Ready to put in the reps? Start by keeping your FLK1 and FLK2 knowledge sharp so the substance never lets you down in an SQE2 task — try hands-on practice with the Ant Law SQE Question Bank at antlaw.ai, drill the practice-area topics you're weakest on, then sit down and draft your first attendance note against the clock this week. That combination — warm law, timed skills — is what gets people over the line.