A candidate emailed us last month with a very ordinary problem. She had spent fourteen months as a paralegal in a debt recovery team, six weeks on a university law clinic rota, and a summer answering phones at a housing charity. Her question: "Does any of that count towards QWE, or have I wasted a year?"
Short answer — almost all of it counts. Longer answer: it only counts if you can prove it, and proving it is where people come unstuck two weeks before they want to apply for admission. Passing SQE1 and SQE2 is the visible half of solicitor qualification. Qualifying Work Experience is the quiet half that nobody chases you about until it is too late to reconstruct.
What actually counts as QWE for solicitor qualification
Admission as a solicitor of England and Wales rests on four pillars under the Solicitors Act 1974 as administered through the SRA Authorisation of Individuals Regulations: a degree or equivalent qualification, a pass in SQE1, a pass in SQE2, two years' qualifying work experience, and satisfying the SRA's character and suitability requirements. QWE sits alongside the assessments, not after them.
The regulatory test for QWE is refreshingly short. The experience must involve providing legal services, and it must give you the opportunity to develop some or all of the competences in the SRA's Statement of Solicitor Competence. That is it. There is no list of approved employers and no requirement that you touch every competence.
So what does "providing legal services" mean in practice? It does not mean reserved legal activities in the Legal Services Act 2007 sense. Drafting a particulars of claim, taking a client's instructions on a tenancy dispute, running a bundle for a hearing, reviewing disclosure, preparing a completion statement, researching a point of trusts law for a supervising solicitor — all legal services. Photocopying and diary management, on their own, are not.
Useful rule of thumb: if a client (internal or external) benefits from legal work you personally did, and a solicitor could look at it and say "yes, she did that", it is very likely QWE.
The breadth surprises people. Paid or unpaid both count. A training contract counts, but you no longer need one. Paralegal work counts. Placements, sandwich years, university law clinics and pro bono advice sessions count. In-house legal teams count. Voluntary organisations such as advice centres count. Work in an overseas jurisdiction can count. Time spent before you sat SQE1 counts, as does time gained while you are revising for FLK1 and FLK2, and time after you pass SQE2.
What does not count
Purely administrative or clerical roles with no legal content. A non-legal job at a law firm. Academic study on its own, including an LLM. Time when you were not actually working — long unpaid leave, for instance. And any period nobody is willing or able to confirm.
Two years, four organisations: doing the arithmetic
You need two years full-time equivalent, gained at no more than four organisations. Those two constraints trip up different people for different reasons.
On the two years: the SRA does not publish a magic number of hours. Full-time is measured against the ordinary working pattern of the organisation you were in. If you worked three days a week for three years, that is roughly your two years. If you did a Saturday morning law clinic for two academic years, be honest — that might be four or five weeks' equivalent, not "two years of clinic experience". Keep a running tally in weeks or days rather than a vague sense of "about a year and a half".
On the four-organisation cap: this catches candidates who have collected lots of short placements. Six two-month internships across six firms cannot all be counted. Choose the four that give you the most weeks and the strongest confirmer. A single organisation with several seats or departments still counts as one organisation, which is why a training contract or a long paralegal role is administratively simple even though it is not required.
Before you accept a short placement, ask yourself: is this worth one of my four slots? Sometimes the answer is no, and that is fine — do it for the experience and count something else.
Who can confirm your QWE — and what to do if nobody will
Confirmation is the part candidates underestimate. Your QWE must be confirmed by a solicitor holding a current practising certificate, or by the organisation's Compliance Officer for Legal Practice. Where neither exists — a charity with no solicitor on staff, or an overseas employer — the SRA permits confirmation by a solicitor outside the organisation who has direct knowledge of your work, or by another suitably regulated person, subject to the current SRA guidance. Check that guidance before you rely on it.
The confirmer is asked to confirm the details of the work experience and that it gave you the opportunity to develop the relevant competences. They are not certifying that you are competent, and they are not vouching for your character. Say this out loud when you ask — supervisors who think they are signing a professional guarantee tend to hesitate.
Three practical moves that save real pain later:
- Ask for confirmation when you leave, not two years afterwards. People move firms, retire, and forget.
- Record your confirmer's full name and SRA number at the time. Chasing a number from a former supervisor you have lost touch with is grim.
- Keep a leaving email or letter summarising your role and dates, even if the formal confirmation happens later. It is your evidence trail if the confirmer becomes unreachable and you need to ask the SRA about alternatives.
How to log QWE properly: mySRA and your private record
There are two logs, and you need both.
The official one lives in your mySRA account. You record each period of QWE — organisation, dates, hours or working pattern, and your confirmer's details — and the SRA contacts the confirmer. You can record each block as you finish it, or record everything at once before applying for admission. Do it as you go. Batch-processing four organisations at the end, while also waiting on SQE2 results, is a needless bottleneck.
The unofficial one is yours: a simple spreadsheet or document mapping your work against the Statement of Solicitor Competence. The competences are grouped under ethics and professionalism, technical legal practice, working with other people, and managing yourself and your own work. You do not need to hit all of them. You do need to be able to answer, in a job interview or if the SRA queries an entry, what you actually did.
A sample log entry that works
14 March — Drafted letter before claim in a supply-of-goods dispute (approx. £18,000). Researched implied terms as to satisfactory quality and applied the Practice Direction on Pre-Action Conduct. Supervisor amended tone of paragraph 4; noted that a threat of costs before the protocol period expires reads badly to a judge. Competences: technical legal practice; ethics and professionalism.
Two lines of detail, one line of reflection, one competence tag. That is enough. Write it the same week, because your memory of why the supervisor changed something disappears fast. And keep it anonymised — the duty of confidentiality in the SRA Code of Conduct applies to your revision notes just as it applies to your file notes. No client names in a document you email around.
Sequencing QWE with FLK1, FLK2 and SQE2
Is it better to work first or sit the exams first? There is no single correct order, but there are patterns worth knowing.
Candidates already in a paralegal seat often benefit from sitting SQE1 early. The two papers cover 13 subjects across FLK1 and FLK2 — 180 single best answer questions each, five hours and twenty minutes per paper — and much of that content is far away from whatever your day job happens to be. A litigation paralegal who waits three years will still have to learn solicitor accounts and wills from scratch. Meanwhile, live client contact is genuinely useful for SQE2, where client interviewing and case and matter analysis reward people who have sat in a real meeting room.
Candidates with no legal role yet usually do better to get SQE1 done, because a pass in FLK1 and FLK2 makes paralegal applications considerably easier, and the QWE clock then runs while you work. Either way, do not treat QWE as something that starts after the exams. It runs in parallel, and the two years is a floor, not a ceiling.
Three mistakes we see repeatedly
Counting a non-legal role at a law firm because the building had solicitors in it. Losing track of a fifth organisation and having to drop the best-quality experience. And assuming that character and suitability is a formality — it is a separate assessment, and matters such as unspent criminal convictions, dishonesty findings or serious financial difficulty should be raised with the SRA early rather than at the point of admission.
Your action list this week
- Open a spreadsheet. List every legal role you have held, with exact start and end dates, working pattern, and a named potential confirmer.
- Total the full-time equivalent weeks. Note the gap to two years and how many of your four organisation slots remain.
- Email any former supervisor you have not spoken to in over a year, before the trail goes cold.
- Log your current role in mySRA now, rather than waiting until you leave.
- Start the weekly reflective entry. Four lines, every Friday.
QWE is not a hurdle designed to catch you out. It is the part of solicitor qualification that turns exam knowledge into judgement — and the only part where the paperwork is entirely within your control.
If the exams are the piece you are less certain about, CELE SQE has been teaching SQE candidates since the first sitting in 2021. Our SQE1 courses run at £3,720 (long-term), £2,750 (mid-term) and £1,750 (short-term), with single-FLK options at half those prices and £150 off for early booking or if you are within three months of your exam. The SQE2 course is £1,450 and includes 61 full mock questions built one-to-one to the official SRA format. Questions about sequencing your QWE around a sitting? Reach us on WeChat SQE100 or at [email protected].