Career Paths After Qualifying: Private Practice, In-House or Public Sector

Here is the question almost nobody asks until it lands on them like a wet sandbag: you've passed FLK1 and FLK2, ground through two years of Qualifying Work Experience, cleared the SRA's character and suitability checks — and then someone hands you a practising certificate and asks where you'd like to spend the next thirty years. The qualification was the hard, structured bit. The career choice is the open-ended bit, and there's no model answer.

The honest truth is that the route you pick — private practice, in-house, or public sector — shapes your hours, your pay, your stress, and the kind of lawyer you eventually become far more than the firm's logo ever will. So let's actually talk about the three big paths, what they feel like from the inside, and how the work you put into your SQE exam preparation quietly sets you up for each one.

Private practice: the default that isn't really a default

Most people picture "solicitor" and picture private practice — a law firm, billing clients, doing deals or running litigation. It's the most visible route and the one the training-contract machinery has historically funnelled people towards. But "private practice" covers an enormous spread, from the magic and silver circle giants in the City down to a two-partner high-street firm doing conveyancing and probate in a market town.

What unites them is the business model: you sell your time, the firm bills it, and you're expected to hit targets. In the larger commercial firms that usually means chargeable-hour goals that can feel relentless. In smaller firms the pressure is different — fewer billable-hour spreadsheets, more "you are the entire department, please don't miss that limitation date."

Who actually thrives here

Private practice rewards people who like variety of clients, who don't mind being measured, and who get a genuine kick out of technical mastery. If the bits of FLK1 you secretly enjoyed were the Business Law and Practice and Dispute Resolution questions — the ones where you had to work out who sues whom for what and how the company is structured — corporate or litigation seats will feel like home. If FLK2's Property Practice and Wills and the Administration of Estates clicked, residential and private client work in a regional firm might suit you better than you expect.

The upside is structured progression, decent training, and (in commercial firms) the strongest starting salaries in the profession. The downside is the obvious one: the hours can be brutal, and "work-life balance" in a busy transactional team is sometimes a phrase you say wistfully on the train home at 11pm.

A quick worked example

Take Priya, who qualified into a mid-sized regional firm after doing her QWE partly as a paralegal and partly during a placement year. She'd assumed she wanted corporate. Three months into a real estate seat she realised she actually liked the rhythm of property transactions — the certainty, the closing, the client who shakes your hand at completion. She qualified into property, not corporate. The lesson? Your SQE subject preferences are a useful hint, but the seat that suits you is something you can only really learn by doing the work. Don't over-commit to a label at age twenty-three.

In-house: closer to the business, further from the timesheet

Going in-house means becoming the lawyer for a single organisation — a company, a bank, a tech firm, a charity, a football club, whatever. You're no longer selling billable hours; you're a cost centre that exists to keep the business out of trouble and get deals done. That single shift changes almost everything about the day-to-day.

The classic appeal is commerciality. In-house counsel sit in the room when decisions are made, not just when the contract needs signing. You stop being the external adviser who gets handed a problem at 6pm and start being the person who could have stopped the problem at 9am. For a lot of solicitors that proximity to the actual business is intoxicating.

The best in-house lawyers I know stopped asking "what does the law say?" and started asking "what is the business trying to do, and how do I get them there safely?" That mental switch is the whole job.

It's worth being clear-eyed about the trade-offs, though. A common piece of advice is that you should rarely go in-house straight after qualifying. Most in-house teams are small and want someone who can already run a matter without much supervision, which usually means a few years of private practice training first. There are exceptions — large in-house teams do occasionally take newly qualified solicitors — but the path more often runs: train in private practice, then move in-house once you've got a specialism the business actually needs.

What in-house roles tend to reward

• Breadth over depth. A sole legal counsel at a growing company might touch contracts, employment, data protection, a property lease and a dispute all in one week. Niche specialists can find that uncomfortable.
• Commercial judgement. The answer "it depends, here are five risks" doesn't fly. The business wants a recommendation.
• Influence without authority. You can't bill someone into doing the right thing. You have to persuade.

Pay in-house is genuinely variable. Senior in-house roles in large companies can match or beat private practice; junior or charity-sector roles often pay less than the equivalent firm job, but with hours that let you have a life. People rarely go in-house for the money. They go for the sanity and the closeness to the business.

Public sector and the routes people forget exist

This is the path that gets the least airtime and arguably deserves more. Public sector and "purpose-driven" legal work covers a sprawling range: the Government Legal Department, the Crown Prosecution Service, local authority legal teams, regulators, the NHS, and the not-for-profit and advice sectors — law centres, charities, legal aid firms doing housing, immigration and family work.

If you went into law because you wanted to do something that matters — and a fair few of us did, before the spreadsheets ground it out — this is where that instinct lives. A local authority solicitor doing childcare proceedings, or a CPS lawyer running criminal cases, is doing work with real human stakes every single day.

The honest pros and cons

The pros are real: better hours than commercial private practice, pension arrangements that the private sector struggles to match, meaningful work, and often a more humane culture. The con everyone mentions is pay — public sector and legal aid salaries sit well below City rates, and that gap widens as you become more senior. The other quiet challenge is resourcing: many public bodies and legal aid practices are stretched thin, so you may carry a heavier caseload with less support than a comparable commercial role.

If your FLK1 revision lit you up around Constitutional and Administrative Law, or if Criminal Law and Practice in FLK2 felt less like a slog and more like a calling, the public sector is worth a serious look. Those aren't just exam subjects — they're the daily bread of huge chunks of public and prosecutorial law.

Comparing the three at a glance

No table can capture a career, but it can frame the trade-offs honestly. Treat this as a starting point for your own thinking, not gospel.

How your qualification route quietly shapes your options

Here's something candidates under-appreciate while they're buried in SQE revision: the way you build your route to qualification feeds directly into which doors open later. The SQE deliberately decoupled the assessment from where and how you train, which means QWE is now your single biggest lever on employability.

Two years of Qualifying Work Experience can be assembled from up to four organisations. That flexibility is a gift if you use it deliberately. Spend some QWE in a litigation team and some in a commercial setting, and you've got a genuine basis for comparing private practice against in-house before you commit. Do a stint in a law centre or local authority and you'll know — in your gut, not just on paper — whether public sector work is for you. The SRA sets out what counts as QWE and how it must be confirmed; check the current requirements on sqe.sra.org.uk and the wider rules on sra.org.uk rather than relying on what a forum told you eighteen months ago.

Does the SQE itself open or close any of these doors?

Broadly, no — and that's the point of how to become a solicitor under the current system in England and Wales. Once you've passed both SQE assessments, completed QWE, hold a qualifying degree or equivalent, and satisfied the SRA on character and suitability, you're a solicitor full stop. There isn't a separate "in-house licence" or "public sector qualification." The same admission gets you everywhere.

What does matter is the strength of your foundations. The subjects you actually understand — rather than merely crammed and forgot — become the specialisms you can credibly offer an employer. A solicitor who properly internalised Solicitors Accounts and Property Practice is far more useful to a conveyancing-heavy firm than someone who scraped through and dreads the first completion. The exam is a gate, but the knowledge behind it is portable career capital.

Choosing — and the freedom to change your mind

If you're agonising over this before you've even sat your assessments, breathe. You do not have to decide now. Careers in law are far less linear than the recruitment brochures suggest. People move from private practice into industry, from the public sector into a firm, from in-house back into practice when a sector cools off. The profession is mobile.

A few practical prompts that tend to cut through the noise:

1. Money or margin? Be honest about whether you're optimising for earnings or for time and meaning. Most regret comes from pretending you don't care about one of them.
2. Depth or breadth? Do you want to become the best in the country at one narrow thing, or a versatile generalist who can turn a hand to anything? Private practice tends to reward the former, in-house the latter.
3. Whose problem do you want to solve? A roomful of commercial clients, a single business you grow with, or members of the public who genuinely need help and can't always pay for it.
4. What did the work feel like? Pay attention during QWE. The seat where you lost track of time is telling you something the salary survey never will.

And don't underestimate the foundations. Whichever path you're leaning towards, the better you understand the underlying law, the more options you keep open. That's the unglamorous reason serious candidates drill the substance hard during SQE exam preparation rather than chasing tips and shortcuts. A tool like the Ant Law SQE Question Bank earns its keep here — working through single-best-answer questions tagged by FLK subject lets you spot which areas you actually enjoy, not just which ones you can pass. That signal is genuinely useful when you're weighing up where to take your career.

A final word on pass rates and pressure

People obsess over SQE pass rates as though a single number decides their future. It doesn't. Pass rates move between sittings, and the SRA publishes the current figures in its own reports — go to the source rather than trusting a half-remembered statistic. What matters for your career isn't whether you passed in the cohort with the higher or lower rate; it's whether you came out the other side understanding the law well enough to be useful. Employers in all three sectors can tell the difference, even if they can't always articulate it.

So treat the SQE as the start of the conversation, not the end. Pass FLK1 and FLK2 properly, use your QWE to test-drive at least two of these worlds, and let your genuine interests do the steering. The qualification is the same everywhere; what you build on top of it is yours.

If you're still in the thick of revision, the most productive next step is simple: do more realistic questions, in exam conditions, across every FLK subject — and notice which ones you'd happily do all day. Try the Ant Law SQE Question Bank at antlaw.ai for hands-on FLK1 and FLK2 practice, and let the subjects you enjoy point you towards the career that'll actually suit you.