You sit down at the Pearson VUE terminal. On screen there is a short instruction from your supervising solicitor, three attachments totalling six pages, and a blank word-processing window. The client, a small manufacturing company, has been served with a notice by its landlord and wants to know where it stands. You have the law in your head from SQE1. You have a keyboard. And you have less than an hour.
This is where a lot of otherwise strong candidates wobble. Not because they do not know the law — they usually do — but because nobody ever taught them how to turn legal knowledge into a document that a real client, or a real opponent, would accept. That gap is exactly what the SQE2 legal writing and drafting assessments are built to expose.
What the SQE2 Legal Writing and Drafting Stations Actually Ask
SQE2 assesses five skills: client interviewing (with attendance note and case analysis), advocacy, case and matter analysis, legal research, and legal writing and drafting. Writing and drafting are assessed as separate exercises, and they are not the same thing.
Legal writing means producing a piece of correspondence — usually a letter or an email — to a client, to another party's solicitor, or occasionally to a third party such as a lender or an insurer. You are explaining a position, advising on options, or making a proposal.
Legal drafting means producing or amending a legal document: a clause in a contract, a witness statement, part of a statement of case, a deed of variation, a letter before claim in the form required by the pre-action protocol, a board minute. Here the audience is a court, a counterparty, or a future reader who will interpret your words strictly.
Both tasks are set across the five SQE2 practice contexts — business organisations, dispute resolution, property practice, wills and intestacy with administration of estates, and criminal litigation. Timings for each station are set out in the latest SRA assessment specification, so check the current version before you book; what matters for your preparation is that you will not have time to draft twice. There is no second draft. What you type is what is marked.
The standard is the competence of a newly qualified solicitor on day one of practice — someone who can be handed a file and produce something a partner would send out after light editing. Not a first-class essay. A usable document.
Two Marking Streams: Skills and Application of Law
Every SQE2 exercise is marked against both skills and application of law. In writing and drafting, that split has a practical consequence that candidates consistently underestimate.
You can state the law impeccably and still lose a large slice of the marks because your letter opens with three paragraphs of statutory recitation, has no headings, uses Latin the client will not understand, and never actually tells the client what to do next. Equally, a beautifully structured, warm, well-signposted letter that gets the legal position wrong will not save you.
So build a habit: after you finish, spend sixty seconds reading it back with two hats on. Hat one — is the law right, applied to these facts, with the correct next steps and deadlines? Hat two — would a non-lawyer understand this on a single reading?
Structure that earns marks in a client letter
- Reference line and a subject heading naming the matter.
- One or two sentences confirming your instructions and what the letter covers.
- A short summary of the key facts as you understand them — this protects you if the facts are wrong.
- The legal position, in plain English, under sub-headings.
- Options, with the commercial and cost consequences of each.
- Your recommendation. Clients want a view, not a menu.
- Next steps, who does what, and by when.
- Appropriate caveats: costs, funding, limitation, the need for further information.
Notice how much of that is not law. It is professional habit. And it is trainable in a fortnight.
Drafting Craft: Clauses, Statements and the Discipline of Precision
Drafting is where the marker can see, line by line, whether you have ever thought about how a document is read against you later. A few working rules.
Say who does what, and when. Every operative clause should have an identifiable actor, an obligation, and a time. "The Seller shall deliver the Goods to the Site by 5pm on 30 June 2026" beats "delivery to be effected in due course" every time. Reserve "shall" for obligations, "may" for discretions, and "will" for statements of future fact.
Define once, use consistently. If you capitalise a defined term, use it everywhere. Switching between "the Property", "the premises" and "the building" invites an argument about whether you meant three different things.
Respect formality requirements. A contract for the sale or other disposition of an interest in land must be in writing, incorporate all expressly agreed terms in one document, and be signed by or on behalf of each party — section 2 of the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989. A deed must be clear on its face that it is a deed and be validly executed and delivered under section 1 of the same Act. If a task hands you a document that fails these tests, flagging it is often part of the mark scheme.
Get the litigation formalities right. A witness statement is written in the first person, in the witness's own words, in numbered paragraphs, with exhibits identified by initials and number, and it must be verified by a statement of truth in the wording required by the Civil Procedure Rules — including the acknowledgement that contempt proceedings may follow a false statement made without an honest belief in its truth. Statements of case follow their own conventions under CPR Part 16. Markers look for these.
Watch for the statutory overlay. Drafting an exclusion clause in a business-to-business supply agreement? The reasonableness test in the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 is lurking. Consumer contract? The fairness regime in Part 2 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 applies instead. Removing a director? Section 168 of the Companies Act 2006, ordinary resolution, special notice — and check the articles and any service contract before you write to the client promising a quick result.
The Pearson VUE Reality: A Bare Screen and No Safety Net
SQE2 runs on a closed Pearson VUE platform. There is no browser, no internet, no access to your own precedents, and search behaves like a basic Ctrl+F rather than a legal database with Boolean operators. Formatting tools are minimal. You cannot rely on autocomplete or on a template you have half-memorised from work.
What follows from that? Practise on a plain text editor with the spell-check switched off. Type your own headings. Get comfortable producing a clean, readable layout using nothing but line breaks, numbered paragraphs and capitalised headings. If your handwriting-era habit is to draft on paper first, break it now — you do not have the time.
And read the attachments properly before you type a word. Five focused minutes with the file — noting names, dates, sums, and the one deadline hidden in paragraph four of the third document — will save you from the single most costly error in these stations: advising confidently on the wrong facts.
A Six-Week Practice Routine for Writing and Drafting
Reading model answers is comforting and largely useless. Producing documents under timed conditions is uncomfortable and works. Try this rhythm:
- Weeks 1–2: one letter and one drafting task per week, untimed. Focus purely on structure. Build a personal skeleton for each document type and keep it to half a page.
- Weeks 3–4: move to full exam timing, one task per practice context. Rotate: business, dispute resolution, property, wills and estates, criminal. Do not always practise the areas you enjoy.
- Week 5: swap work with another candidate and mark each other against skills and application of law separately. Marking someone else's letter teaches you more in an hour than rereading your notes for a day.
- Week 6: back-to-back simulation days on a plain screen, no spell-check, no notes.
A quick self-test before you submit: does my document tell the reader (1) where they stand, (2) what their choices are, (3) what I think they should do, and (4) what happens next? If any answer is missing, add it — even one line will do.
Five errors that quietly cost marks
- Writing to the client in the register you would use to opposing solicitors — cold, dense, unexplained.
- Copying chunks of the instructions back into the document instead of analysing them.
- Ignoring costs, funding and the professional conduct angle when the facts clearly raise one.
- Leaving the recommendation implicit. Say it: "In my view you should…".
- Running out of time and stopping mid-sentence. Budget the last five minutes for the closing section, always.
Carrying SQE1 Knowledge Into SQE2 Documents
SQE1 tests 13 subjects across FLK1 and FLK2 through single best answer questions — 180 per paper, five hours twenty minutes each. That knowledge does not disappear at SQE2; it becomes raw material. The difference is that nobody hands you four options any more. You must decide what is relevant, discard what is not, and commit it to writing in a form someone will act on.
So when you revisit contract, land law or dispute resolution before SQE2, revise them as a practitioner would: what is the rule, what does the client need to be told about it, and what does the paperwork have to say to make it work? That single shift in mindset is, in my experience of teaching this exam since 2021, the thing that separates a comfortable pass from a resit.
How CELE SQE Can Help
If you want structured practice rather than guesswork, the CELE SQE2 course is £1,450 and includes 61 full mock questions built 1:1 to the official SRA format, covering writing and drafting alongside the other three skills. Candidates still working through the knowledge stage can look at our SQE1 courses — long-term £3,720, mid-term £2,750, short-term £1,750, with single FLK options at half price and £150 off for early bookings or bookings within three months of the exam.com — no obligation, and we are happy to look at a sample of your drafting and tell you honestly where it stands.
