Ninety single-best-answer questions. Then a break. Then ninety more. That is FLK1 โ 180 MCQs split across two sessions of 2 hours 33 minutes each, sat on the same day, with seven functioning legal knowledge subjects rotating past you in no particular order. Nobody tells you when Contract stops and Tort starts. The Business Law question about directors' duties can sit directly next to a question on judicial review time limits, and you have to switch mental gears in about four seconds.
Most candidates prepare by subject and then sit an exam that refuses to behave by subject. That mismatch is where marks leak. So this is less a revision syllabus and more a battle plan: how to budget the clock, what each of the seven FLK1 areas actually rewards, and what to do when you genuinely do not know the answer.
The clock is the real examiner
Do the arithmetic once and never forget it. Each FLK1 session gives you 153 minutes for 90 questions. That is 1 minute 42 seconds per question โ 102 seconds โ including reading the fact pattern, eliminating options, selecting, and moving on. There is no reading time bolted on the front. The clock starts and you are already behind.
What that budget means in practice:
- By question 30 you should have roughly 102 minutes left. Not 95. If you're at 90, you're over-reading.
- By question 60 you should have roughly 51 minutes left. This is the checkpoint that matters most โ it is late enough to be meaningful and early enough to correct.
- Anything over three minutes on a single question is a mark you are stealing from two other questions. Flag it, guess, move.
Candidates routinely lose six to eight minutes across the first twenty questions because they read each fact pattern twice before looking at the options. It feels diligent. It is not. Read the final line of the stem first โ the actual question โ then read the facts with a purpose. That single habit reliably buys back five minutes a session, and five minutes is three questions.
Seven subjects, one paper: where the marks sit
FLK1 covers Business Law and Practice; Dispute Resolution; Contract; Tort; the Legal System of England and Wales; Constitutional and Administrative Law and EU law; and Legal Services, which is the ethics and professional conduct strand. Thirteen subjects across SQE1 in total once you add FLK2's six.
A caveat worth taking seriously: the SRA does not invite you to plan around a fixed number of questions per subject, and anyone selling you a precise per-topic question count is guessing. Check the current assessment specification on sqe.sra.org.uk for the authoritative position on scope and weighting. What follows is a planning heuristic โ a way to divide your revision hours โ not a claim about the paper you will sit.
| FLK1 subject | Planning share of your revision time | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Business Law and Practice | High | Broad, procedural, heavily rules-based; rewards drilling |
| Dispute Resolution | High | Procedure-dense; easy marks if you know the sequence, brutal if you don't |
| Contract | Medium-high | Conceptually tight, but examiners love remedies and misrepresentation overlap |
| Tort | Medium-high | Duty/breach/causation is well-trodden; the traps are in defences and specific liabilities |
| Constitutional and Administrative Law and EU law | Medium | Narrower than it looks once you map the grounds of review |
| Legal System of England and Wales | Low-medium | Small volume, high yield per hour โ do not neglect it |
| Legal Services (ethics and conduct) | Threaded throughout | Appears across the paper, often inside another subject's fact pattern |
Business Law and Practice
BLP questions tend to be long. They give you a company, a shareholding split, a proposed transaction and a procedural wrinkle, then ask what must happen next. The winning approach is mechanical: identify the decision-maker (board or shareholders), identify the majority required, identify whether anyone is conflicted or must abstain, then check the filing or notice consequence. Four steps, every time.
Where people drop marks: confusing the resolution type needed, and forgetting that a director with a personal interest may be excluded from the count. Also partnership and sole-trader questions, which candidates under-revise because companies feel more "real". They are not harder โ they are just quieter in most revision plans.
Dispute Resolution
This is the subject that most rewards raw repetition. Litigation is a sequence, and the exam tests whether you know the order and the consequence of getting it wrong. Statements of case, disclosure, witness evidence, expert evidence, interim applications, offers to settle, costs consequences, appeals, enforcement. If you can recite the skeleton in order, half the questions collapse into "which stage is this?".
Deliberately avoid memorising any figure or deadline you have picked up from an old set of notes without checking it against current sources โ thresholds and limits do get revised, and a confidently wrong number is worse than a considered guess.
Contract
Formation questions are usually the friendliest marks on the paper. Offer, acceptance, consideration, intention โ answer these fast and bank the time. The difficulty sits later: remoteness, mitigation, the measure of damages, and the point where a misrepresentation question quietly becomes a rescission-versus-damages question. Know the difference between an expectation measure and a reliance measure well enough to spot which one the facts are pushing you towards.
Tort
Everyone revises negligence. Fewer people properly revise the boundaries โ pure economic loss, psychiatric injury, occupiers' liability distinguishing lawful visitors from trespassers, vicarious liability, and the defences. Examiners know this. A tort question that opens with a straightforward-looking accident often turns on whether the claimant was a visitor, whether the loss was purely economic, or whether the employee was acting in the course of employment.
Constitutional and Administrative Law and EU law
Smaller than its reputation. Map the grounds of judicial review, get comfortable with standing and the supervisory nature of the court's role, understand parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law as organising principles, and know how retained EU law now sits in the domestic hierarchy. Most questions here reward structure rather than depth.
Legal System of England and Wales
The cheapest marks per hour of revision on the entire paper. Court hierarchy, precedent, statutory interpretation, the routes of appeal, the judiciary. It is a small body of material, it is testable in a very limited number of ways, and candidates skip it because it feels like first-year undergraduate content. Spend a weekend on it. You will not regret it.
Legal Services: ethics, everywhere
Professional conduct is not a block you can revise once and file away. It runs through the paper, and it is frequently embedded inside another subject's fact pattern โ a conveyancing-adjacent conflict, a client who wants you to mislead the other side, a request to hold money you shouldn't. Train yourself so that the moment a fact pattern mentions two clients, a personal interest, a gift, or money moving in an odd direction, an alarm goes off.
The candidates who pass FLK1 comfortably are rarely the ones who know the most law. They are the ones who decide fastest โ and who have made peace with guessing on six questions so they can think properly about the other eighty-four.
A worked example: the question is testing your reading
Consider a fact pattern along these lines.
A solicitor acts for a private company on the sale of its warehouse. The buyer is a company in which the solicitor's brother holds a 40% shareholding and sits on the board. The solicitor does not act for the buyer. The seller's managing director, who has known the solicitor for years, asks the solicitor to "keep things moving quickly" and not to raise a minor boundary discrepancy the solicitor has noticed in the title documents, on the basis that the buyer's solicitors will probably spot it anyway. What should the solicitor do?
The options will typically offer you: proceed but disclose the family connection; decline to act entirely; proceed and say nothing about the boundary because the duty is to the client; proceed and raise the boundary point with the client, explaining the limits on what may be withheld; or refer the matter to another firm.
Two issues are stacked here, and the question is testing whether you separate them. The brother's shareholding is an own-interest concern โ it needs identifying and addressing, but it is not automatically fatal on these facts. The instruction about the boundary discrepancy is the sharper problem, because a solicitor cannot go along with a plan to mislead the other side, even passively, and cannot follow an instruction that would compromise the duty not to deceive. The correct answer will be the one that keeps the solicitor acting honestly with the third party while handling the client relationship properly.
Notice what actually did the work: not recall of a rule number, but the discipline of spotting that the question contained two problems and identifying which one determines the answer. That is a trainable skill, and it is trained by volume โ doing hundreds of conduct-flavoured MCQs until the pattern-recognition becomes automatic. This is the part of SQE exam preparation that a textbook cannot give you, and it is the single strongest argument for building your revision around a large, well-tagged question bank rather than around re-reading notes.
The three-pass method, and how to use the flag button
Do not attempt to answer 90 questions in one linear sweep. Work in three passes.
- Pass one โ the sweep. Answer everything you can resolve inside 90 seconds. If a question resists, pick your best instinctive option, flag it, and move. Never leave a blank: there is no penalty for a wrong answer, and an unanswered question is a guaranteed zero. Target: finish pass one with 30โ35 minutes remaining.
- Pass two โ the flags. Return to flagged questions with fresh eyes. You will find that perhaps a third of them now look obvious, usually because a later question jogged something loose. Give each one two minutes maximum.
- Pass three โ the sanity check. With your final minutes, confirm every question has an answer recorded. Do not "improve" answers you were confident about. First instincts on questions you knew are usually right; second-guessing them is how confident candidates manufacture losses.
One caution about flagging: if you flag thirty questions, the flag has stopped meaning anything. Flag sparingly โ ten to fifteen per session is a workable ceiling. Anything more suggests the problem is knowledge, not strategy, and no exam-day tactic fixes that.
Eight weeks out: a plan that survives real life
Most candidates are revising around a job, a training contract, or Qualifying Work Experience. A plan that assumes six clean hours a day will be abandoned by week two and will leave you demoralised. Build for the life you actually have.
- Weeks 8โ6: content consolidation, one subject at a time, with 30โ40 MCQs a day drawn from the subject you finished last week. Never test only what you studied that morning โ the delay is the point.
- Weeks 5โ3: mixed-subject practice only. This is the phase most people skip and most people need. Random subject order, timed, no notes.
- Weeks 2โ1: full-length timed sittings, plus the wrong-answer book. Two 90-question sittings under exam conditions per week is a realistic ceiling for most people alongside work.
- Final few days: no new material. Re-read your own error log, sleep properly, and confirm the logistics of your assessment centre.
For the mixed-subject phase specifically, the Ant Law SQE Question Bank is built for exactly this shape of work โ over 14,000 single-best-answer questions tagged by FLK subject and sub-topic, a practice engine that pushes your weak topics and previously wrong answers back in front of you, and 90-question, 180-minute mock sittings that mirror the SRA's format and timing ratio. If you are shopping around for the best SQE question bank, the feature that matters more than sheer question count is whether the platform tells you which sub-topics you are quietly failing. Volume without diagnostics is just typing.
Keeping FLK1 in perspective
FLK1 is one of two SQE1 assessments โ FLK2 follows with its own 180 questions across Property Practice, Wills and the Administration of Estates, Solicitors Accounts, Land Law, Trusts, and Criminal Law and Practice. Beyond SQE1 and SQE2 sit the other SRA requirements for solicitor qualification in England and Wales: a degree or equivalent qualification, two years of Qualifying Work Experience, and the character and suitability assessment. If you are mapping out how to become a solicitor in the UK, treat FLK1 as one gate among several rather than the whole journey, and take the procedural specifics from sra.org.uk rather than from forum folklore.
On SQE pass rates: they are published by the SRA after each sitting, they move, and a meaningful proportion of candidates do not pass FLK1 first time. Look up the current statistics report on sqe.sra.org.uk rather than trusting a number someone quoted to you eighteen months ago. Fees, booking windows and assessment dates likewise โ all authoritative on the SRA site, none of it worth guessing at.
Here is the concrete next step. Sit one 90-question, timed session this week. Not to score well โ to find out where your clock breaks. Note the question number at which you first fell behind, and note the three sub-topics that produced your wrong answers. That single diagnostic is worth more than another week of re-reading. You can run exactly that sitting, and the drills that follow it, on the Ant Law SQE question bank at antlaw.ai โ on iOS, Android or in the browser, with an AI tutor available in several languages if a question leaves you arguing with the explanation. Questions about access or content go to [email protected].