Legal Writing – Course Summary:
UNIT 1: LEGAL WRITING SKILLS
The written skills:
4 written skills assessed in SQE2: Case and Matter Analysis; Legal Research; Legal Writing; and Legal
Drafting.
Two further aspects assessed in the context of SQE2:
o Negotiation: The SRA has made it clear that all deliveries of SQE2 will contain at least one assessment
involving negotiation. It will be in either: (i) case and matter analysis; and/or (ii) legal writing.
o Ethics and professional conduct: Questions on ethics and professional conduct will be pervasive
throughout SQE2. Issues will not be flagged. May arise in all written assessments.
The practice areas:
The full details can be found in Annex 1 of the SRA’s SQE2 Assessment Specification.
SQE2 written assessments - the practicalities:
The SQE2 written skills will be assessed over three assessment days. You will take a total of 12 written
skills assessments. On each day you will sit four assessments spread across two sessions.
—> The form of the assessments:
Computer based-assessments. You can see how these will be presented by looking at the SRA website
(‘SQE2 exam functionality on Pearson VUE’).
There is no spell check or highlighting function.
A copy and paste function will be available. Read about how this works on the SRA website.
Closed book. If the assessment requires knowledge of an aspect of the law which a Day One solicitor would
have to look up, this will be given to you in the assessment.
You will be provided with an erasable whiteboard notepad and marker pen.
The time limit will be rigidly enforced; indeed, there is likely to be an automatic ‘time out’ which prevents
anything further being added to the answer once the allocated time has expired.
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, —> The assessment criteria:
The Apply the law correctly to the client’s situation.
application of Apply the law comprehensively to the client’s situation, identifying any ethical and professional conduct
the law issues and exercising judgment to resolve them honestly and with integrity.
criteria:
Correctly and comprehensively: For instance, in an assessment where the candidate has to identify the legal
issues, credit for this might be given under legally comprehensive. Where the legal issues are made explicit
in the question, credit under legally comprehensive might be awarded for giving a comprehensive analysis
of those issues, not just for identifying them.
The clear, • using clear, succinct and accurate language and avoiding unnecessary technical terms where they are
precise and not appropriate to the recipient; and
acceptable • using an acceptable style of communication for the situation and recipient.
language
Marking the SQE2 assessments:
The marking will be carried out by a solicitor, who will have been trained and who will assess candidates on
both skills and application of law.
The assessor will assess candidates’ performance against the criteria using a scale from A to F and making
‘global professional judgments related to the standard of competency of the assessment’.
Skills and application of the law are weighted equally.
To pass SQE2 candidates will need to obtain the overall pass mark for SQE2.
What standard will you be expected to achieve?
The standard against which you will be assessed is the ‘threshold standard’, which is the standard of
competency of the Day One solicitor.
The ‘threshold standard’:
The starting point is the Statement of Solicitor Competence (SoSC) which is a set of competencies which
apply to all solicitors.
o To reflect the development of these competencies throughout a solicitor’s career different levels of
performance (from 1 to 5) apply at different stages. Candidates for SQE2 are expected to achieve level 3
(Day One solicitor).
o Level of performance which is expected of a level 3 solicitor in six key areas:
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, —> Statement of Solicitor Competence:
‘Competence’ is defined by the SRA as ‘the ability to perform the roles and tasks required by one’s job to
the expected standard’.
In the SoSC the SRA has set out what solicitors should be able to do in these four key areas:
A. Ethics, professionalism and judgment
B. Technical legal practice
C. Working with other people
D. Managing themselves and their own work
In turn, each area is broken down into a series of propositions (A1, A2 etc.) with examples provided.
For each of the SQE2 assessments you should check which of the competencies the SRA has identified as
being relevant, with a view to demonstrating these in the assessment.
Functioning Legal Knowledge for SQE2:
SRA provides guidance on level of detail required: “In demonstrating that they have reached the standard of
competency of a Day One Solicitor, candidates will need to demonstrate that they can apply fundamental
legal principles in the skills-based situations covered by SQE2 in a way that addresses the client’s needs and
concerns. They will need sufficient knowledge to make them competent to practise on the basis that they can
look up detail later. Candidates will not be expected to know or address detail that a Day One Solicitor
would look up, unless they have been provided with that detail as part of the assessment materials.”
The questions in SQE2 are designed to test legal skills within the context of the application of
fundamental legal rules and principles at the level required of a competent newly qualified Solicitor.
They are not designed to test specialist practice which is unlikely to be encountered at the level of a
Day One Solicitor.
For SQE1 purposes, the SRA provided that:
On occasion in legal practice a case name or statutory provision, for example, is the term normally
used to describe a legal principle or an area of law, or a rule or procedural step (e.g. Rylands v
Fletcher, CPR Part 36, Section 25 notice). In such circumstances, candidates are required to know
and be able to use such case names, statutory provisions etc. In all other circumstances candidates
are not required to recall specific case names, or cite statutory or regulatory authorities.
The same provision arguably applies by analogy to SQE2 but remember that you may be provided with legal
materials as part of an SQE2 assessment. In that case you would be expected to refer to any case names and
statutory authorities which these contain, as appropriate.
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WRITTEN COMMUNICATION SKILLS:
Written communication is a central part of a solicitor’s practice. Solicitors need to be able to communicate
clearly in writing with a range of different people, such as clients, opponents and the court.
As well as making sure that their written communication is precise and accurate, they need to communicate
in a way appropriate to their audience; this is the ‘tone’ of the communication.
Style: ideally, your writing should be clear, concise and a pleasure to read. It should convey your ideas to
your reader as fluently as possible. While your written style should always be courteous, your tone and
vocabulary should be tailored to the recipient.
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, Spelling, punctuation and grammar:
Poor punctuation, spelling and grammar will undermine the authority of anything that you write.
There is no spell check function for the SQE2 written assessments. The SRA has made clear its intention
that in the SQE2 assessments candidates should not be penalised for minor spelling mistakes.
Instead the focus will be on the Assessment Criteria and how such mistakes impact on them.
It states that candidates should not lose marks for spelling mistakes that would normally be flagged by
spell check and which do not impact on the legal accuracy, clarity and/or certainty of the written text.
—> Spelling:
Commonly confused words:
o Nouns and verbs - ie licence is a noun, license is a verb: practice is a noun, practise is a verb
o Nouns and adjectives - ie stationery is a noun, stationary is an adj
o There/their/they’re
o Your/you’re
—> Punctuation:
Inverted commas (‘‘). Also known as or speech marks or quotes and are used to flag up direct speech.
o She shouted, ‘That’s enough’.
o Note that there is a comma before the inverted commas and the first word begins with a capital letter.
o Inverted commas are not used in indirect speech when the speaker’s actual words are not quoted.
o In formal writing, they are used to flag up informal words. When they are used in this way, it is not
necessary to put in a comma or a capital letter. “She did not want to ‘diss’ him in front of his friends.”
—> Grammar:
SRA states candidates should not lose marks for grammatical errors that do not impact on legal accuracy,
clarity and/or certainty of the written text and do not make the written text inaccessible to the reader.
o e.g. grammatical errors in the use of tense could have such an impact
First/ second/ third person.
o You would usually write a letter to a client or a memo to a partner in the first person singular, e.g. ‘I
have carried out the research you requested’.
o However, law firms usually write to each other in the first person plural, e.g. ‘We have the following
comments on your client’s proposal’.
o Legal documents, such as leases, are drafted in the third person, e.g. ‘The landlord will allow the tenant
to park on the forecourt’.
Shall and will:
‘I/ we shall be responsible for the repairs to the roof.’ In the first person this implies choice: something
that I/we are going to do voluntarily.
But, I/we will be responsible for the repairs to the roof suggests obligation: something I/we must do.
However, in the second or third person it is the other way round. ‘You/ he/ she/ they shall be
responsible for repairs to the roof’ implies an obligation.
‘You/ he/ she/ they will be responsible for the repairs to the roof’ simply describes what is going to be
done in the future.
Make sure that you consider whether an obligation is being created or not and that this is clearly
reflected in what you write.
Prepositions:
o Sentences should not finish with prepositions. Prepositions are words which normally appear before
nouns and pronouns such as ‘about’, ‘for’, ‘on’, ‘which’ and ‘what’.
o ‘That’s the case I told you about’, in formal writing should be, ‘That’s the case about which I told you’.
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