An advocate in Mumbai with nine years of litigation behind her sent us a message last spring. She had won cases in front of appellate benches, drafted commercial contracts worth millions, and trained juniors. Yet she opened with an apology: "I'm worried I'll look like a beginner in the SQE." She wasn't. But she had spotted something real — the assessment does not care how senior you are at home. It cares whether you can pick the single best answer on English law, under time pressure, in a Pearson VUE test centre.
If you are already qualified elsewhere and eyeing solicitor qualification in England and Wales, this piece is for you. Not a summary of the route — you can find that anywhere — but the parts international candidates consistently underestimate.
Exemptions, QWE and what your existing qualification is actually worth
Start with the boring administrative question, because it changes everything downstream. Qualified lawyers can apply to the SRA for an exemption from part or all of the SQE assessments, based on their existing qualification and professional experience. Whether you get one — and how much of one — depends on your jurisdiction and your evidence. Apply early. Exemption decisions take time, and you do not want to be paying for a full SQE1 preparation course while an application is still pending.
The second piece is qualifying work experience (QWE). Two years' full-time equivalent, across up to four organisations, confirmed by a solicitor of England and Wales or a COLP. The point that surprises people: QWE does not have to be earned in England and Wales, and it does not have to come after your exams. Legal work you have already done overseas may count, provided it gave you exposure to the relevant competences and you can find someone eligible to confirm it. Check the current SRA guidance before you assume anything, and keep a contemporaneous record — dates, matters, competences touched. Reconstructing four years of work from memory is miserable.
Do this in week one: (1) submit or scope your exemption application; (2) list every employer since you qualified and note who could confirm QWE; (3) only then book an SQE1 sitting. Sequencing saves months.
Rewiring civil-law habits for SQE1 FLK1 and FLK2
Candidates trained in codified systems — China, Brazil, France, Japan, much of the Middle East — often tell us the hardest adjustment is not vocabulary. It is authority. In a code system you reason from the article outwards. In England and Wales you reason from a mess of statute and decided cases, and the case can be the primary source.
Negligence is the classic example. There is no negligence code. There is Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562, then decades of refinement on duty, breach, causation and remoteness. Contract formation is the same: Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co [1893] 1 QB 256 still does real work in an exam question about unilateral offers. Meanwhile partnership questions turn on the Partnership Act 1890 — a statute older than most of the world's civil codes, and still the default rulebook where partners have not agreed otherwise.
So what do you actually do about it? Stop reading cases as stories. Read them as rules with facts attached. For each authority you learn, write one line: the proposition, and the fact that triggers it. If you cannot state the trigger fact, you will not recognise the rule when it appears in an SQE1 scenario dressed in different clothes.
The subjects that ambush international candidates
FLK1 covers 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 Property Law and Practice, Solicitor Accounts, Land Law, Trusts Law, Wills and the Administration of Estates, and Criminal Law and Practice. Thirteen subjects in total, and the pain is rarely evenly distributed.
Three usually cause the most trouble for overseas lawyers:
- Land Law and Property Practice. Estates, interests, the distinction between legal and equitable rights, registration under the Land Registration Act 2002, and formality rules such as section 52 of the Law of Property Act 1925 requiring a deed to convey a legal estate. If your home system uses a notarial deed and a single ownership concept, English land law will feel almost medieval. It is. Learn the vocabulary first — freehold, leasehold, overriding interest — before attempting the reasoning.
- Trusts Law. Many jurisdictions simply have no equivalent. Do not try to map trusts onto fiduciary or agency concepts from home; the mapping breaks. Treat it as a new language.
- Solicitor Accounts. Rule-driven, arithmetic-light, and highly scoreable. Client money versus business money, and what must never be mixed. International candidates often skip it because it looks unglamorous. That is a mistake — it is among the most predictable material in FLK2.
Legal Services deserves a mention too. Money laundering obligations under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and the money laundering regulations, plus the SRA Principles and Codes of Conduct, generate a steady stream of questions. Professional conduct is examined pervasively, meaning an ethics point can surface inside a property or litigation question without warning.
Reading English legal English fast enough
Each SQE1 paper is 180 single best answer questions in 5 hours 20 minutes. That is roughly 1 minute 46 seconds per question, including reading a scenario that may run to 150 words. If English is your second or third language, the bottleneck is often comprehension speed, not legal knowledge.
The fix is unglamorous: volume. Work through practice questions under a timer from the very start of your preparation, not in the final month. Train yourself to read the final sentence of the stem first — the actual question — then the facts. And build a personal glossary of the words that slow you down. "Notwithstanding", "purported", "in the alternative", "on the balance of probabilities". Ten seconds lost per question is thirty minutes across a paper.
A habit worth stealing: after every practice set, write down not the correct answer but why the wrong option tempted you. Distractor patterns repeat. Your own error patterns repeat even more.
SQE2: five skills, and the platform nobody warns you about
SQE2 assesses five practical skills — Client Interviewing, Advocacy, Case and Matter Analysis, Legal Research, and Legal Writing and Drafting. For experienced overseas lawyers this ought to be the easier half. Often it isn't, for two reasons.
The first is register. English legal writing to a client is plainer than most jurisdictions expect. Short sentences. No Latin unless it is genuinely standard. A letter that begins with three subordinate clauses will lose marks even if the law is right. Practise writing advice a non-lawyer could act on.
The second is the delivery environment. SQE2 runs on the Pearson VUE closed platform. No browser, no internet, no Boolean searching. Your only navigation tool inside the provided materials is Ctrl+F. If you have spent your career with a research database that accepts complex queries, this is a genuine handicap — and the Legal Research task gives you 60 minutes. Practise single-term searching. Practise choosing the right search word on the first attempt. It is a skill, and it is trainable.
For the oral tasks, accent is not assessed; clarity is. Slow down. Signpost — "There are two issues here. Let me take them in turn." Assessors need to hear structure. And in Advocacy, remember you are addressing a court in England and Wales: forms of address, and the expectation that you will concede the weak point rather than defend everything, differ from adversarial traditions elsewhere.
Practical logistics: sittings, centres and building a realistic timeline
SQE1 is available at Pearson VUE centres in a wide range of countries. SQE2, because of the oral components, is offered at a smaller number of locations. Before you plan anything, check the current list of international centres and the booking windows — they close earlier than people expect, and popular centres fill.
A workable timeline for a practising lawyer studying alongside a full caseload looks something like this. Six to nine months for SQE1, treating FLK1 and FLK2 as two separate campaigns rather than one giant blur. Then three to four months for SQE2 once SQE1 is behind you. Compressing further is possible if you can take study leave, but be honest about your weekly hours before you book.
One more thing. Do not delay your QWE confirmations until after the exams. If your overseas experience qualifies, get it logged and confirmed while the people who supervised you are still contactable. Nothing derails an otherwise successful qualification like a supervisor who has moved firms and stopped answering emails.
How CELE SQE can help
We have taught international candidates through every SQE sitting since the first in 2021, so the civil-law-to-common-law adjustment is familiar territory for us. 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 if an exemption means you only need FLK1 or FLK2 — and £150 off for early bookings or bookings made within three months of your exam. The SQE1 question bank is £575 per month, textbooks are £950 for the full set or £570 for a single FLK, and the SQE2 course is £1,450 with 61 full mocks built to the official SRA format. If you would like a straight answer about your own exemption position or timeline, message us on WeChat SQE100, email [email protected], or have a look at celebar.com.