SQE2 Legal Writing and Drafting: What "Competent" Looks Like

Most candidates who fail an SQE2 written task do not fail because they got the law wrong. They fail because they wrote an essay when the client wanted a letter.

That is the uncomfortable truth about Legal Writing and Drafting. You spent months on FLK1 and FLK2 learning to spot the single best answer in ninety seconds, and now you're being asked to do something almost opposite: slow down, write in full sentences, address a human being who has no idea what "consideration" means, and make a recommendation you'd be willing to stand behind. The skill set doesn't transfer automatically. Nobody warns you about that.

So what does a "competent" answer actually look like? Not a brilliant one. Not a first-class-essay one. Competent — which is the standard the SRA is genuinely measuring against.

The standard is "day one solicitor", not "star trainee"

SQE2 assesses five practical skills: Client Interviewing (with the attendance note and legal analysis that follows it), Advocacy, Case and Matter Analysis, Legal Research, and Legal Writing and Drafting. These are tested through oral and written tasks across five practice areas — Business organisations, rules and procedures; Dispute Resolution; Property Practice; Wills and Intestacy, Probate Administration and Practice; and Criminal Litigation. There is no multiple choice here. Nobody is going to give you four options and let you eliminate two.

The benchmark the SRA works to is the competence you'd expect from a newly qualified solicitor on their first day in practice. Someone who is safe. Someone whose work you could read, tweak lightly and send. That framing matters more than any technique tip, because it tells you what to cut: the throat-clearing, the academic hedging, the four-paragraph history of an area of law that the client did not ask about.

Your work is marked on two things running in parallel — the legal skill itself (structure, clarity, tone, whether you actually did the task set) and the application of law (is the law right, and is it applied to these facts?). Assessors are qualified solicitors marking holistically against published criteria. You don't scrape marks by sprinkling in extra legal content; you get credit for the whole document working as a document. For the current task breakdown, timings and how the grades aggregate, go to sqe.sra.org.uk — that's the only source worth trusting, and it changes.

Writing and drafting are not the same task

A small distinction that catches people out. Legal writing usually means a letter or email — to a client, to the other side, occasionally to a third party like a lender or an executor. Drafting means producing or amending a legal document or part of one: a clause, a witness statement, particulars of claim, a letter before claim, a simple agreement.

Writing is about communication. Drafting is about precision. The register, the level of legal detail and the tolerance for ambiguity are all different, and a candidate who writes their drafting task in a chatty client-friendly voice has already lost ground before the first full stop.

The anatomy of a competent letter or email

There is no single approved template, and anyone selling you one is overselling. But competent answers do converge on a shape, because that shape is what works in practice.

1. Open by answering the question

Not "Thank you for your email of 3 March, in which you asked about..." for four lines. One line of acknowledgement, then the headline. If the client asked whether they can remove their fellow director, tell them in the first paragraph whether they can. The rest of the letter explains how and what it will cost them.

Candidates lose real marks here through sheer politeness. I've seen answers where the actual advice appears on what would be page two of the letter. In practice, a partner would have scribbled "bury the lead?" in the margin.

2. Give the law, but keep it in service of the advice

You need to show the assessor you know the legal framework. You do not need to cite section numbers to a lay client, and you certainly don't need to quote them. A competent answer explains the rule in plain terms and applies it: "Under company law, shareholders holding a majority of the voting rights can remove a director by ordinary resolution at a general meeting, regardless of what the director's service contract says. That is the route available to you." That sentence demonstrates knowledge and delivers advice simultaneously. Two birds.

Where the reader is another solicitor, or the task explicitly asks for a memo to a supervising partner, the calibration shifts — there, statutory references and authorities are appropriate, and leaving them out looks sloppy. Read the task. It tells you who you're writing to and that determines everything.

3. Deal with the bad news

The single most reliable marker of a weak answer is that it only tells the client what they want to hear. Competent answers flag the risk: the director may have a claim for breach of contract or unfair dismissal; the deadline may already be tight; the survey result may affect the lender's willingness to proceed; the estate may not have enough liquid assets to pay the inheritance tax before the grant issues.

Bad news, delivered clearly and without drama, is what separates advice from cheerleading.

4. Finish with next steps and a clear ask

What happens now, who does it, and by when. "Please confirm by Friday whether you'd like me to prepare the special notice and draft resolution, and I'll circulate them to the other shareholders." Concrete. Actionable. It takes twenty seconds to write and it is routinely missing.

5. Get the mechanics right

Consistent British English spelling, no stray Americanisms, sensible paragraphing, headings if the letter is long, no unexplained abbreviations. If you've written a 700-word wall of text with no paragraph breaks, the assessor is reading it in a worse mood than they started in. That's not in any marking criteria, but it's human.

The assessor isn't asking "is this candidate clever?" They're asking a duller and far more useful question: would I be comfortable if this letter went out on my firm's letterhead with my name underneath it?

A worked example: the same facts, two answers

The scenario. Your client, Priya, owns 60% of the shares in a small events company. Her co-founder, Marcus, holds 40% and is also a director on a two-year service contract with eighteen months left to run. Marcus has stopped turning up. Priya wants him out of the business and emails asking: "Can I just sack him? He's barely worked since January."

Task: write an email to Priya advising her.

The weak answer (paraphrased from the pattern I see constantly)

"Dear Priya, Thank you for your recent email. In order to advise you, it is necessary to consider the relevant law. A director may be removed from office by the shareholders. There is also the separate question of the director's employment. The law on unfair dismissal requires two years' continuous service. Directors owe duties to the company, including a duty to promote the success of the company. It may be possible to argue that Marcus is in breach of his duties. I would be happy to discuss further."

Everything in there is legally defensible. It is still not competent. It never tells Priya whether she can do what she wants to do, it doesn't apply anything to Marcus's 40% holding or his eighteen-month contract, it introduces directors' duties and then abandons the point, and it ends with nothing for her to actually do.

The competent answer

"Dear Priya, Short answer: yes, you can remove Marcus as a director, but doing it badly could cost the company money, and removing him as a director does not remove him as a shareholder. Here's how it breaks down."

Then, in short signposted chunks:

• Removing him as a director. Your 60% shareholding is enough to pass an ordinary resolution removing him at a general meeting. There is a formal notice procedure to follow and he has a right to be heard, so this needs to be done properly rather than by email.
• His service contract. Removing him from office doesn't automatically end his contract. With eighteen months to run, terminating it early without cause is likely to expose the company to a damages claim for the remaining term. If his non-attendance amounts to a serious breach, the position may be different — I'll need to see the contract and a record of his absences.
• His shares. He keeps his 40% unless he agrees to sell or the articles provide otherwise. That gives him blocking rights over anything requiring a 75% majority. Worth thinking about now rather than in a year's time.
• What I'd suggest. Before we serve any notice, send me the service contract, the articles and any shareholders' agreement, plus dates of his absences since January. A negotiated exit is very often cheaper than a contested removal.
• Next step. Can you send those documents by Wednesday? I'll then set out the two routes with likely costs.

Notice what that answer does. It is not longer than the weak one by much. It contains no section numbers. It applies every legal point to Priya's actual numbers and Marcus's actual contract, it separates three issues she had merged into one, it flags cost and risk, and it asks for something specific. That's the standard.

Where candidates throw marks away

Sitting with people who've had a disappointing SQE2 result, the same handful of causes come up again and again.

1. Not doing the task set. The instructions said "email to the client". The candidate wrote a memo to a partner. Or the instructions said "advise on limitation only" and the candidate advised on everything. Read the task twice before writing a word — it costs sixty seconds and saves the whole answer.
2. Front-loading the law. Three paragraphs of general principle followed by two lines of application. Reverse the ratio.
3. Time collapse. Written tasks run to a fixed, fairly tight window — check the current timings on sqe.sra.org.uk. Candidates routinely spend a third of it perfecting the first two paragraphs, then produce a rushed, bullet-pointed ending with no next steps. Draft a two-line plan first. Always.
4. Tone drift. Starting formal, drifting conversational, then panicking and going formal again. Pick a register in the first sentence and hold it.
5. Silence on risk. If there's a downside and you don't mention it, you have written a marketing document, not advice.
6. Shaky underlying law. This one is fixable and it is the one people ignore. You cannot write competently about a limitation period, an executor's duties or the requirements for a valid lease if you're not certain of them. Writing skill does not paper over a gap in knowledge — it exposes it, because in prose you can't hide behind eliminating two wrong options.

Drafting-specific traps

When the task is drafting rather than writing, the failure modes shift. Vague obligations ("the parties shall endeavour to..."), undefined terms used inconsistently, missing dates and parties, no consideration of what happens on breach, and — the classic — drafting a clause that reads beautifully but doesn't achieve what the client asked for. Read your clause back and ask: if the other side wanted to wriggle out, where's the gap?

How to actually practise this

Legal Writing and Drafting is a skill, which means the only way to build it is repetition with feedback. Reading model answers is pleasant and does very little.

Three things that work:

• Write to the clock, every time. Untimed practice teaches you to write well slowly, which is not the skill being tested. Set a timer, plan for two minutes, write, stop when it goes off — even mid-sentence. That teaches pacing faster than anything else.
• Read your answer aloud. Genuinely. Clunky sentences, missing logic and the absence of a clear recommendation all become obvious the moment you hear them. If you run out of breath mid-sentence, it's too long.
• Use your QWE. If you're accruing qualifying work experience while preparing, you are surrounded by real examples of competent legal writing. Save the letters your supervisor sends out. Notice how short they are. Notice how quickly they get to the point. That archive is worth more than any template.

On the knowledge underneath: the five SQE2 practice areas map closely onto material you covered for FLK1 and FLK2, so don't let it decay in the gap between assessments. Twenty minutes a day of targeted multiple-choice practice in Business, Dispute Resolution, Property, Wills and Criminal keeps the framework live in your head, which is exactly what you need when you're writing under time pressure. The Ant Law SQE Question Bank is handy for that — the smart practice engine surfaces your weak sub-topics rather than the ones you already know, and the wrong-answer book gives you an honest list of what to shore up before SQE2. Ten minutes on the app between meetings does more than an hour of re-reading notes.

A note on the wider picture

SQE2 pass rates have historically run higher than SQE1 — which sounds reassuring until you remember that everyone sitting SQE2 has already cleared SQE1, so it's a stronger field. Look up the SRA's published statistics for the current position rather than relying on what someone told you in a study group. And remember that passing both assessments is only part of qualifying as a solicitor in England and Wales: you also need a qualifying degree or equivalent, two years of qualifying work experience, and to satisfy the SRA's character and suitability requirements. The full picture of how to become a solicitor in the UK lives on sra.org.uk.

Competence, in the end, is unglamorous. It's clear structure, correct law applied to the facts in front of you, honest risk, and a next step. Write like someone who has forty other files open and a client waiting — because that's exactly who you're training to be.

Next step: pick one of the five SQE2 practice areas this week, write a 350-word client email on a real scenario from your QWE files, and time yourself. Then shore up the legal knowledge behind it — try a timed subject set on the Ant Law SQE Question Bank at antlaw.ai for FLK1 and FLK2 practice that keeps your black-letter law sharp enough to write from. Questions? [email protected].