You have five or ten years of practice behind you — corporate deals in Mumbai, litigation in São Paulo, contracts in Lagos. Then you move to London, or your firm asks you to requalify, and you discover that none of your existing qualifications automatically make you a solicitor of England and Wales. The one route left open to almost everyone is the SQE. And here is the part that surprises many experienced lawyers: the SQE largely treats you the same as a fresh graduate. No shortcuts for seniority. So how do you turn a foreign practising background into a genuine advantage rather than a source of frustration?
Why the SQE is now the single conversion path
Since 2021 the SRA has replaced the old conversion route for qualified foreign lawyers with the SQE. Whether you trained in a common law country or a civil law jurisdiction, the destination is the same: pass SQE1, pass SQE2, meet the character and suitability requirements, and satisfy the qualifying work experience rule.
The one concession the SRA offers experienced lawyers is an exemption. If your qualification and experience overlap with what an SQE assessment tests, you may apply to be exempted from part of it. In practice, full exemptions are rare and are granted only where the SRA is satisfied your competence matches the standard. Do not build your plan around one. Assume you will sit both stages, and treat any exemption you win as a bonus. If you want to explore this, apply to the SRA early — the assessment of your documents takes time, and you cannot book an exam sitting on the strength of an exemption you have not yet been granted.
A useful mindset: the SQE does not ask whether you are a good lawyer in your home country. It asks whether you can apply the law of England and Wales at day-one solicitor level. Those are different questions.
Where your foreign training helps — and where it quietly hurts
If you come from a common law system, you already think in precedent. Cases such as Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] establishing the duty of care in negligence, or Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co [1893] on offer and acceptance, will feel like relatives of things you have argued before. Statutory reasoning under the Partnership Act 1890 or the Companies Act 2006 follows a familiar logic. That transfers well into FLK1 subjects like Contract Law, Tort Law and Business Law and Practice.
Civil law lawyers face a steeper climb on method, but not an impossible one. The bigger risk for every international candidate is the opposite of ignorance — it is false familiarity. You may "know" what a trust is, or what a mortgage does, from your own system, and answer an SQE question from that memory. The single best answer format punishes this. The MCQ often turns on one English-law detail: the exact remedy, the precise limitation period, the specific conduct rule. Your instinct gives you a plausible answer; the SRA wants the correct one.
The subjects where foreign lawyers most often lose marks are the ones with no clean equivalent abroad: Land Law and Property Law and Practice (the English system of estates, co-ownership and registered conveyancing is genuinely distinctive), Trusts Law, Wills and the Administration of Estates, and Solicitor Accounts — the last of which almost nobody has seen before, because it is a purely English regulatory topic. These sit largely in FLK2, so budget more time there than your confidence suggests you need.
What SQE1 actually demands: FLK1 and FLK2 in numbers
SQE1 is two papers of 180 single best answer questions each, sat over 5 hours 20 minutes per paper. FLK1 covers seven subjects: English Legal System, Contract Law, Business Law and Practice, Dispute Resolution, Tort Law, Constitutional and Administrative Law and EU Law, and Legal Services. FLK2 covers six: Property Law and Practice, Solicitor Accounts, Land Law, Trusts Law, Wills and the Administration of Estates, and Criminal Law and Practice.
Two things follow for a working lawyer. First, breadth beats depth. You will not be asked one hard question about your specialism; you will be asked one manageable question about each of thirteen areas, and you cannot afford a blank subject. Second, the professional conduct thread — the SRA Principles and Codes of Conduct — runs through both papers and through every SQE2 skill. As a qualified lawyer you have professional habits already, but English conduct rules on client money, conflicts and confidentiality are specific. Learn them as rules, not as ethics you assume you share.
A realistic preparation timeline
Most international candidates in full-time work need six to nine months for SQE1 if starting the English law content from scratch, less if you already work in an English-law environment. A workable shape:
- Months 1–2: build the two "alien" pillars first — Land Law/Property and Trusts/Wills — while they are hard and your energy is fresh.
- Months 3–4: layer on the subjects your background supports (Contract, Tort, Business Law, Dispute Resolution) so they consolidate quickly.
- Month 5 onward: drill Solicitor Accounts and professional conduct, then move into full-length MCQ practice under timed conditions.
Practise questions from early, not just at the end. Reading English textbooks feels productive, but for a foreign lawyer the fastest way to expose false familiarity is to get a question wrong and read why the "obvious" answer was not it.
SQE2 skills: where practising experience finally pays off
Here the tables turn in your favour. SQE2 assesses five practical skills — Client Interviewing, Advocacy, Case and Matter Analysis, Legal Research, and Legal Writing/Drafting. If you have interviewed clients, argued in court or drafted commercial documents, the underlying competence is already yours. What changes is the format and the language.
Two adjustments matter most for international candidates. The first is written English. SQE2 rewards clear, plain, well-structured English legal prose. If English is not your first language, drafting practice is your highest-return investment — short sentences, correct English legal terminology, no over-formal padding. The second is the platform. SQE2 runs on the closed Pearson VUE system: no internet, no browser, no Boolean search. In the 60-minute Legal Research task you navigate the provided materials using little more than Ctrl+F, so you must know English sources well enough to find the right rule fast without Google as a safety net.
Do not "translate" your practice style directly. In an English advocacy task, courtesy to the bench, correct mode of address, and a tightly structured submission score points that a brilliant but differently-shaped foreign argument may not.
Qualifying work experience and the paperwork trap
Beyond the exams you need two years (or full-time equivalent) of qualifying work experience. The good news for many international lawyers: relevant legal work you have already done, in England or abroad, can count if it gave you exposure to solicitor competences and is confirmed by a solicitor or your organisation's compliance officer. Up to four placements are allowed. So the years you spent practising overseas are not wasted — but you must be able to evidence them properly, so keep records and get sign-off arranged early.
The other paperwork strand is character and suitability. Disclose fully and in good time; a foreign disciplinary matter or regulatory record handled honestly is far less of a problem than one that surfaces later. Start the SRA account, the exemption enquiry and the QWE documentation in parallel with your study — not after you pass, when a delay could cost you a qualification date.
A short action list to start this week
- Open your SRA account and lodge any exemption enquiry, sending certified documents.
- Sit a diagnostic set of MCQs across all thirteen subjects to find your real gaps, not your assumed ones.
- Block Land Law, Trusts and Solicitor Accounts into your calendar first.
- Line up who will confirm your qualifying work experience, and start logging it.
How CELE SQE can help
We have coached internationally qualified lawyers through the SQE since the very first 2021 sitting, so we know exactly where foreign training helps and where it trips people up. Our SQE1 courses run from £1,750 (short-term) to £2,750 (mid-term) and £3,720 (long-term), with a single-FLK option at half price if an exemption covers one paper, and £150 off for early birds. The SQE2 course is £1,450 and includes 61 full mock questions built 1:1 to the official SRA format — ideal for adapting your existing skills to the English platform. If you would like an honest view on exemptions or a study plan, reach us on WeChat SQE100, at [email protected], or at celebar.com.