The Five SQE2 Practice Areas Explained, With Worked Examples

Ask a room of SQE candidates to name the five parts of SQE2 and roughly half will say "interviewing, advocacy, case and matter analysis, legal research, legal writing and drafting". Which is five skills, not five practice areas — and it's the wrong answer to the question."

That confusion matters more than it sounds. SQE2 is built on a grid: the skills run one way, the practice areas run the other, and every task you sit sits at an intersection of the two. If you revise the skills but treat the practice areas as background scenery, you'll walk into a property drafting task with beautiful technique and nothing to say about a restriction on the proprietorship register.

The grid: five skills, five practice areas

The five assessed skills are Client Interviewing (with the attendance note and legal analysis that follows it), Advocacy, Case and Matter Analysis, Legal Research, and Legal Writing and Drafting. Some are oral, most are written. There is no multiple choice anywhere in SQE2 — that world belongs to FLK1 and FLK2.

The five practice areas the SRA uses as the setting for those skills are:

1. Criminal Litigation, including advising clients at the police station
2. Dispute Resolution
3. Property Practice
4. Wills and Intestacy, Probate Administration and Practice
5. Business Organisations, Rules and Procedures, including money laundering and financial services

Each skill is assessed more than once, and the practice areas are spread across the assessments so that you cannot dodge one by being brilliant at the other four.uk rather than trusting anyone's summary, including mine.

Here's the useful mental model. Think of a rough matrix like this:

One thread runs through all of it: professional conduct and ethics. It isn't a sixth practice area with its own task. It's baked in, so an ethical issue can surface in a probate interview just as easily as in a criminal advocacy exercise. Candidates who spot the conflict, the confidentiality problem or the money laundering red flag — and say so, out loud or on paper — pick up marks that others simply leave behind.

Criminal Litigation, including police station advice

This is the practice area that most rewards decisiveness. The client is often in custody, the clock is running, and you are being assessed on whether you can give clear advice under pressure rather than on whether you can recite the full architecture of criminal procedure.

Expect to be dropped into one of a small number of familiar moments: advising a suspect before interview, making a bail application, mitigating at sentence, or explaining plea and allocation to a bewildered client.

Tiny worked example

Your client, a 24-year-old with no previous convictions, has been arrested on suspicion of assault occasioning actual bodily harm after a fight outside a pub. Disclosure from the officer is thin: CCTV "showing an altercation", one witness who saw "someone in a red jacket" throw a punch. Your client tells you he was defending himself after being pushed.

What's being tested? Not your ability to name a section number. It's whether you can (a) identify that disclosure is limited and say so, (b) advise on the options — answer questions, no comment, or a prepared statement — and explain the risk that a court may later draw an adverse inference from failing to mention something relied on in his defence, and (c) do it in language a frightened 24-year-old can follow. If you say "the prosecution may invite the tribunal of fact to draw an adverse inference pursuant to the relevant statutory provisions", you have technically been correct and practically been useless.

A good answer sounds more like: "Because they've told us very little, one option is a prepared statement — you set out self-defence now, so nobody can say later that you made it up, but you don't have to answer questions you can't fully answer yet."

Dispute Resolution

Civil disputes tend to produce the most "advisory" tasks in SQE2 — case and matter analysis notes, letters weighing up options, advocacy on an interim application. The examiner wants commercial judgement, not a treatise.

The recurring themes are stubbornly practical: does the claim have merit, what is it worth, can it be enforced, what will it cost, what are the deadlines, and should we settle. Limitation, the pre-action protocols, the tracks, disclosure, interim applications, costs consequences of settlement offers — these are the levers you keep pulling.

Tiny worked example

Your client supplied £48,000 of catering equipment to a restaurant chain that has paid £20,000 and gone quiet for nine months. There's a signed order form incorporating your client's standard terms; the chain says the equipment was faulty. The chain has just made an offer under Part 36 of £22,000. Your client is furious and wants "his day in court".

The task might be a note to the supervising partner. The marks are in the structure: strength of the claim on the documents, the likely value net of any counterclaim, the costs risk if the client rejects the offer and fails to beat it at trial, the practical point that a Part 36 offer has a defined period during which acceptance carries automatic costs consequences, and a clear recommendation with a deadline attached. Then — and candidates forget this — a line telling the client what you need from him and by when.

The single most common SQE2 failure isn't legal ignorance. It's writing a beautiful analysis and never telling the client what to do next.

Property Practice

Property is where technique and paperwork meet. If criminal litigation rewards decisiveness, property rewards sequence: you did the searches, you read the title, you raised the enquiry, you reported to the client, you exchanged, you completed, you registered. Get the order wrong and the answer collapses even if every individual point is right.

Tasks here often take the form of a report to a buyer client, a letter explaining a title problem, a drafting exercise on a clause, or an interview with a client buying their first freehold.

Tiny worked example

You act for a buyer of a freehold house on a development completed six years ago. The proprietorship register carries a restriction: no disposition is to be registered without a certificate signed by the management company confirming compliance with the covenants. The seller's solicitor has not supplied a certificate of compliance. Completion is in eleven days.

What a competent newly qualified solicitor does: explain to the client, in plain English, that without that certificate the buyer's ownership cannot be registered — so this is not a technicality to be waved through; raise the requisition immediately with the seller's solicitor; ask about the fee and turnaround the management company typically requires; and set out the options if it can't be obtained in time, including delaying completion. Notice how much of that is process, not law. Property tasks are graded on whether you would be safe to let loose on a real transaction.

A quiet warning from experience: candidates who did their qualifying work experience (QWE) entirely in litigation often treat property as the practice area they'll "read up on later". Later has a habit of becoming the week before.

Wills and Intestacy, Probate Administration and Practice

This one carries the highest emotional load, which is exactly why it appears so often in interviewing tasks. The client is recently bereaved, or is making a will and doesn't want to discuss dying, or is a child of the deceased who thinks a sibling has helped themselves to the contents of the house.

Two things are being assessed at once: whether you can handle a human being with tact, and whether you know the machinery — validity of wills, intestacy rules, who may apply for a grant, the different types of grant, the personal representatives' duties, and the inheritance tax framework at a level a newly qualified solicitor would be expected to handle.

Tiny worked example

Mrs Okafor has died without a will. She leaves a husband, two adult children, a house held as beneficial joint tenants with her husband, and around £310,000 in savings and investments in her sole name."

The answer has two moving parts. The house passes to the husband by survivorship — it never forms part of the estate distributed on intestacy, which surprises a lot of clients. The sole-name assets go through the intestacy rules, where the surviving spouse takes the personal chattels and a statutory legacy, with the balance then divided between the spouse and the children. Do not quote a statutory legacy figure from memory in the exam or in practice; it has been uprated more than once, and the current figure is the sort of thing you look up rather than recall. Say the structure confidently, flag that you'll confirm the figure, and move on.

Then the human bit: "So the short answer is no, not everything — but your father is likely to receive the largest share."

Business Organisations, Rules and Procedures

The broadest of the five, and the one that swallows money laundering and financial services alongside company procedure. Tasks tend to involve a private limited company doing something ordinary but procedurally fiddly: appointing or removing a director, issuing shares, approving a transaction in which a director has an interest, or a shareholder falling out with everybody else.

Marks live in the procedure. Which resolution — ordinary or special? Board meeting or general meeting, or both? What notice is required? Does anything need filing at Companies House, and within what period? Is there an entry to make in a statutory register? A candidate who says "the shareholders can remove him" and stops has said something true and incomplete.

Tiny worked example

Three shareholders each hold a third of a small logistics company. Two want to remove the third, who is also a director, after he set up a competing business. They want him gone "by Friday".

Your note needs to cover: removal of a director by ordinary resolution of the shareholders, the special notice requirement that makes "by Friday" unrealistic, the director's right to make representations, the fact that removal as a director does not remove him as a shareholder, whether his service contract gives rise to a claim, and the separate question of his duties to the company in relation to the competing venture. Then the ethics: if the firm has previously advised the company and all three individuals, is there a conflict of interest that prevents you acting for two of them against the third? Say it. Out loud, on the page, in the first paragraph if you can.

How to revise five practice areas without doubling your workload

The good news for anyone moving straight from SQE1 is that the underlying legal knowledge overlaps heavily with what you already ground through for FLK1 and FLK2. Dispute Resolution, Criminal Law and Practice, Property Practice, Wills and the Administration of Estates and Business Law and Practice all appear in the SQE1 syllabus. SQE2 changes the verb, not the vocabulary: you stop identifying the single best answer and start producing the document.

A few habits that pay off:

• Keep your FLK knowledge warm. The gap between SQE1 and SQE2 is where hard-won detail quietly evaporates. Twenty minutes of mixed-topic questions a few times a week is enough to hold the line, and a decent question bank makes that frictionless — the Ant Law SQE Question Bank is what I'd point a candidate towards for keeping business, property, wills and dispute resolution live between the two stages.
• Rehearse outputs, not just inputs. Write an actual attendance note. Draft an actual client letter with a heading, a recommendation and a next step. Reading model answers is not the same activity.
• Build a five-by-five checklist. One page per practice area listing the six or seven procedural sequences you'd be embarrassed to fumble. Police station options. Part 36 mechanics. Pre-completion searches. Grant applications. Board and shareholder resolutions.
• Mine your QWE. If your qualifying work experience has been in one department, ask a colleague in another to walk you through one transaction end to end. Half an hour with a residential conveyancer is worth an evening of notes.
• Time everything. Skills tasks are short and unforgiving. Analysis you can't finish scores nothing for its elegance.

On the perennial question of SQE pass rates: the published figures move, and SQE2 has generally behaved differently from SQE1.uk rather than absorbing numbers second-hand from forums, and remember that the route to solicitor qualification in England and Wales also requires a degree or equivalent, two years of QWE and satisfying the SRA's character and suitability requirements. Passing both stages is necessary, not sufficient.

Where candidates actually lose marks

Three patterns, seen over and over:

Practice-area blindness. The candidate has drilled interviewing technique but doesn't know what a will interview needs to cover, so the questioning is warm, well-structured and legally empty.

No recommendation. Options set out neatly, advantages and disadvantages balanced, then nothing. Clients don't pay for balance. They pay for a view.

Silent ethics. The conflict, the undisclosed source of funds, the client asking you to backdate something — spotted mentally, never articulated. If it isn't on the page or in the recording, it didn't happen.

Fix those three and the five practice areas stop feeling like five separate syllabuses and start feeling like one job with five settings.

Start this week with a single page per practice area — the procedural sequences you'd be embarrassed to fumble — and pair it with fifteen minutes of mixed FLK1 and FLK2 questions to stop your legal knowledge going soft between the two stages.uk.