Dispute Resolution SQE1: CPR, Protocols and Costs You Must Know

Dispute Resolution looks deceptively friendly on the FLK1 syllabus. It's procedural, it's rule-based, and unlike Tort or Contract it doesn't ask you to weigh competing lines of authority. So candidates assume they can skim it. Then they sit a practice paper, hit a question about which track a £60,000 claim goes to and whether the defendant's Part 36 offer bites, and the whole thing suddenly feels like a foreign language written in cross-references.

Here's the truth of it: Dispute Resolution rewards precision, not understanding-in-general. The Civil Procedure Rules are a machine. You need to know which lever does what, in what order, and what happens to costs when someone pulls the wrong one. Get comfortable with the mechanics and this becomes one of the most reliable mark-earners in FLK1. Stay vague and it will quietly bleed you.

Where Dispute Resolution sits in FLK1 — and why it punches above its weight

FLK1 covers seven subjects: 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. SQE1 as a whole is two assessments — FLK1 and FLK2 — each 180 single-best-answer multiple-choice questions, sat in two sessions of 2h 33m on the same day. That's a lot of questions and no room to bluff.

Dispute Resolution earns its keep because it overlaps with almost everything. A commercial dispute with a Business Law flavour. A negligence claim that sits on top of your Tort knowledge. A contractual breach where the procedure, not the substance, is being tested. The SRA loves questions where the legal principle is easy but the procedural consequence is the actual point. You spot the breach of contract in two seconds — then spend the next ninety wondering whether the claim form was served in time.

So treat Dispute Resolution as a spine subject. The three areas that generate the most exam questions, in my experience helping candidates through their SQE revision, are the CPR framework and track allocation, pre-action conduct, and costs. Let's take them in that order.

The Civil Procedure Rules: the framework you can't wing

The Civil Procedure Rules 1998 govern how civil claims run in the County Court and the High Court. The overriding objective — dealing with cases justly and at proportionate cost — is not decorative. It's the interpretive lens the court applies to every discretionary decision, and the SQE will test whether you can apply it to a fact pattern about, say, relief from sanctions or an application to amend.

Starting proceedings and the litigation timeline

You need the sequence cold, because MCQs love to scramble it. A claim is started when the court issues a claim form. The claimant then has a limited window to serve it; once served, the defendant must respond by filing an acknowledgment of service or a defence within the prescribed period, or risk default judgment. Miss a step and the consequences cascade — that's exactly the kind of chain the exam wants you to trace.

Know the difference between the ways a claim can be defended or knocked out early: admitting the claim, filing a defence, filing an acknowledgment of service to buy time, or applying for default judgment (claimant) or summary judgment / strike out (either party). Summary judgment under Part 24 turns on whether a party has "no real prospect of success" and there's no other compelling reason for trial. Strike out under Part 3.4 is about the statement of case itself — no reasonable grounds, abuse of process, or non-compliance. Candidates blur these two constantly. Don't.

Track allocation — commit the thresholds to memory

Once a defence is filed, the court provisionally allocates the claim to a track. The monetary thresholds are pure recall, and they come up again and again:

• Small claims track — generally claims up to £10,000 (with a lower £1,000 threshold for most personal injury and certain housing disrepair claims).
• Fast track — claims between £10,000 and £25,000, suitable for a one-day trial with limited expert evidence.
• Intermediate track — claims between £25,000 and £100,000 of modest complexity, with a defined fixed-costs regime.
• Multi-track — the higher-value or more complex claims, typically above £100,000.

The intermediate track is the one that catches candidates who revised from older notes. It sits between fast and multi-track and carries its own fixed recoverable costs structure. If your revision materials don't mention it at all, they're out of date — which is a decent reminder to sanity-check anything time-sensitive against the current position rather than trusting a memory from two years ago.

Track allocation isn't just about the number on the claim form. The court weighs complexity, the number of parties, the nature of the remedy and how much oral evidence is realistically needed. A "£15,000" claim with three experts and a fortnight of trial time is not a fast-track claim.

Pre-action protocols: the part everyone underestimates

Before a single claim form is issued, the parties are expected to have behaved reasonably. That expectation is codified in the Practice Direction on Pre-Action Conduct and Protocols, plus a set of subject-specific protocols — personal injury, professional negligence, debt claims, construction, and so on.

The purpose is genuinely sensible: exchange information early, narrow the issues, and give settlement a proper chance before anyone spends money on litigation. For the SQE, the exam-relevant question is usually the consequence of non-compliance, not the warm feelings behind the protocol.

What a claimant is expected to do

Broadly, before proceedings the claimant should send a detailed letter of claim setting out the basis of the claim, the facts, what they want, and (where relevant) how any sum is calculated. The defendant is given a reasonable period to respond with a full letter of response — admitting, denying, or partly admitting, and setting out their position. The parties should consider alternative dispute resolution, exchange key documents, and only litigate as a last resort.

What happens if a party ignores the protocol

This is where marks live. The court can't strike out a claim simply because a protocol was skipped, but it has teeth on costs and case management. A party who unreasonably refused to engage, ignored a reasonable request for information, or rushed to court can be penalised — for example by an adverse costs order, a reduction in interest, or being ordered to pay costs on the indemnity basis. Unreasonable refusal to consider ADR is treated seriously by the courts.

So when an MCQ describes a claimant who fired off proceedings the day after sending a thin letter, the "best" answer is rarely "the claim is invalid". It's usually the costs sanction. Train yourself to reach for the proportionate procedural consequence rather than the nuclear one.

Costs orders: where the real exam difficulty lives

If Dispute Resolution has a boss level, it's costs. The general rule under Part 44 is that the unsuccessful party pays the successful party's costs — "costs follow the event" — but the court has a wide discretion to order otherwise, and the SQE mines that discretion relentlessly.

Standard basis versus indemnity basis

Two bases of assessment, and the distinction is worth full marks on its own:

• Standard basis — the court only allows costs that are proportionate to the matters in issue, and any doubt about whether a cost was reasonably incurred is resolved in favour of the paying party. Proportionality can trump reasonableness here: a cost can be reasonably incurred and still be disallowed for being disproportionate.
• Indemnity basis — there's no proportionality requirement, and any doubt is resolved in favour of the receiving party. It's more generous to the winner and is typically ordered where a party has behaved unreasonably or improperly.

Remember the default: unless the order says otherwise, costs are assessed on the standard basis. Indemnity costs are the exception, usually flagged by bad conduct in the fact pattern.

Part 36 offers — the trap that separates the confident from the guessers

Part 36 is a self-contained code for settlement offers, and it produces some of the most satisfying — and most missed — SQE questions. The whole point of a Part 36 offer is to shift the costs risk onto the other side. If a party rejects a properly made offer and then fails to do better at trial, the costs consequences follow almost automatically.

The two scenarios you must be able to run in your head:

1. Claimant fails to beat the defendant's offer. If the claimant rejects a defendant's Part 36 offer and is awarded the same or less at trial, the claimant is generally ordered to pay the defendant's costs from the end of the relevant period, usually with interest on those costs. The claimant "won" the case but lost the costs battle from the offer date onwards.
2. Defendant fails to beat the claimant's offer. If the defendant rejects the claimant's offer and the claimant matches or beats it at trial, the claimant can be awarded enhanced consequences — interest at an enhanced rate, costs on the indemnity basis from the end of the relevant period, and an additional amount calculated on the sum awarded.

The "relevant period" is the window (a minimum of 21 days) the offeree is given to accept. Get the timing wrong and you'll pick the wrong answer even if you know the rule — the consequences run from the expiry of the relevant period, not from the date of the offer or the date of trial.

A worked example to make it stick

Let's run a concrete one, because Part 36 only clicks when you attach numbers to it.

A claimant brings a breach-of-contract claim for £80,000. Early in proceedings the defendant makes a valid Part 36 offer of £50,000, with a 21-day relevant period. The claimant rejects it, presses on to trial, and the judge awards £45,000.

What's the costs position? The claimant has technically won — she's recovered damages. But she failed to beat the defendant's £50,000 offer. So the ordinary expectation is that the defendant pays the claimant's costs up to the expiry of the relevant period, and from that point the claimant pays the defendant's costs, typically with interest. The £5,000 difference between the offer and the award has cost her tens of thousands in adverse costs. That's the lesson the rule is designed to teach litigants — and the exam.

Now flip it. Same claim, but the claimant made a Part 36 offer to accept £40,000, the defendant rejected it, and the judge awards £45,000. The claimant has matched or beaten her own offer, so she's in line for the enhanced package: indemnity-basis costs from the expiry of the relevant period, enhanced interest, and an additional amount. Same underlying dispute, wildly different costs outcome, driven entirely by who made which offer and when.

Other costs concepts worth a look

Round out your revision with a few supporting ideas the SQE dips into:

• Qualified one-way costs shifting (QOCS) in personal injury claims — broadly, it protects unsuccessful claimants from paying the defendant's costs, subject to exceptions.
• Fixed recoverable costs — the fast track and the intermediate track carry defined costs regimes, which limits what a winning party can recover.
• Interim costs orders — "costs in the case", "costs reserved" and the like, which determine who bears the costs of interim applications and when that's decided.
• Security for costs — where a defendant asks the court to order the claimant to put up security, on defined grounds.

How to actually revise Dispute Resolution for FLK1

Reading the CPR cover to cover is a waste of your life. Nobody memorises the rules that way, and the exam doesn't reward it. What works is drilling the decision points until the sequence is automatic.

Three habits that pay off:

1. Build a one-page litigation timeline from letter of claim to trial and hang every concept off it. When a question drops you into the middle of a claim, you want to instantly know what came before and what comes next.
2. Turn every wrong answer into a rule. If you misread a track threshold or fluffed the Part 36 timing, write the corrected rule in your own words. This is where a wrong-answer book earns its place — the misses are the syllabus telling you exactly where the gaps are.
3. Practise under single-best-answer conditions. Dispute Resolution questions often have two answers that are both "true" but only one that's the best procedural response. You only build that discrimination by doing volume.

That volume is why a properly tagged question bank matters. Working through the Ant Law SQE Question Bank, you can filter to Dispute Resolution specifically, hammer track allocation and Part 36 until the timing is muscle memory, and let the smart practice engine keep resurfacing the topics where your accuracy is weakest. When a costs question stumps you, the AI Legal Tutor lets you ask why the best answer is best — which is far more useful than just seeing the letter of the correct option.

Keeping the bigger picture in view

Dispute Resolution is one of thirteen functioning legal knowledge subjects across SQE1, and passing FLK1 and FLK2 is only part of the journey to becoming a solicitor in England and Wales. Full qualification also needs a qualifying degree or equivalent, two years of Qualifying Work Experience (QWE), the practical SQE2 skills assessments, and the SRA's character and suitability requirements. It's a long road, and the procedural subjects like this one are where diligent candidates quietly build a lead.

On the numbers — pass rates, fees, sitting and booking dates — don't trust anything you half-remember. Those figures move, and the only authoritative source is the SRA. Check the current position at sqe.sra.org.uk before you plan your timetable or your budget, and read the SRA's own assessment specification to see exactly how Dispute Resolution is weighted.

Here's your practical next step: take a single Dispute Resolution area — I'd start with Part 36, because it's high-yield and endlessly examinable — and do twenty questions in one sitting, then write out the rule behind every one you got wrong. You can run exactly that kind of focused, tagged FLK1 practice on the Ant Law SQE Question Bank at antlaw.ai. Ten minutes a day on the CPR mechanics now beats a panicked skim the week before your exam. Trust me on that one.