Not actually a legal matter but does anyone know about the SQE?

[twobluehorses]

I'm getting more and more confused.

DD is not studying law. She is on a three year degree course and will finish in July 2026 so she is currently in her second year.

She wants to be a solicitor so will have to do the SQE.

If you google it says that you no longer have to do a law conversion course. There are however law conversion courses still running (PGDL). Some of these can be combined with SQE1.

Does this mean that she can do a combined course and therefore do what would have been two years of law school in one year? I'm thoroughly confused but she is looking at applying for a training contract in 2027. Im worried that she's perhaps applying too early and that she does still need to do two years at law school rather than one year?

Googling is not my friend. Baker Mckenzie for example says their law graduates do a 20 week SQE course and their non law graduates do a 4 week foundation course first. This indicates it's fine and she applied in the right year. Other firms seem to indicate their SQE course is a whole year and they also need PGDL which also seems to be 8 months (but they still run from September so effectively its still two years) I'm completely confused. DD thinks she's fine although is also largely winging it since she doesn't know anyone else applying for training contracts.

When you look on the law school websites they confuse things by talking about the combined courses (PGDL plus SQE or LLM with SQE) ranging from 12 months to 18 months and having various start dates.

Can anyone shed any light or does it just vary from firm to firm?

I have read that this was supposed to simplify the route to qualification as a solicitor but it looks a lot more complicated!

She needs to look at the guidance provided by the firms themselves. The real answer is it depends - the SQE is still fairly new and different firms do different things. In theory you don't need to do a course for SQE1 or 2 at all - you can just take the exams but that's pretty risky and most of the big firms will want to make sure their trainees have a legal grounding before starting rather than just having learnt for the test. That might mean saying they still want them to do the PGDL or some form of LLM (which is normally just the PGDL with a little bit extra tacked on!).

Looking up Bakers for example, she's right - she can apply in her penultimate year (or third year, or after she graduates) but she also can't have applied yet - applications don't open until February. If you look at Clifford Chance as an alternative, non-law can't apply until final year (and applications have already closed) and so wouldn't be able to start a training contract until 2028.

If she doesn't have others around her who knows how this all works, I'd advise her to lean heavily on her university careers centre - they do and this is their job.

Also she should be applying for vacation placements. For Summer 2024 these will be closing soon. This is super important.

She probably knows this, but for you (because you'll need to support her) be aware it is very very competitive.

And finally, wow are some firms bad at communicating this information. I think it's because it used to be easy - if you were non-law you applied in your final year, and if you were law you applied in your penultimate year. Now it looks like recruitment teams as some pretty big firms haven't managed to actually write clearly what it is!

And on 'simplifying' it hasn't. What it's done is introduced a way to qualify without a training contract. This stops the bottle neck there used to be where people did their LPC course and then could never qualify because they couldn't get a training contract. The two years' qualifying experience can be in any legal advisory role - you can be a paralegal.

It sounds good but the reality is that not having good solid experience as your two years qualifying experience leads to most people being unemployable. The people coming out as qualified lawyers based on passing the SQE are not being considered by the market as the same as people who have done a training contract. With very few exceptions (and I know one), they're basically not employable as a newly qualified lawyer (NQ).

What has really happened is they've pushed the bottleneck from getting a training contract, to getting an NQ job. And the people who are losing most are those who don't have the background and connections to know it makes a difference. I absolutely hate this change. If they wanted to do this, they should have just shifted to a US model where you qualify when you pass the bar, and newly qualified lawyers aren't expected to have legal work experience. But that would require the SRA to admit that too many people are going through legal education who never have a chance of becoming lawyers (or at least lawyers who earn the amounts people think all lawyers make), and the legal education providers would lose a lot of money if they were honest about this.