SQE2 advocacy: format, timing and how it is marked

You get 45 minutes to prepare and 15 minutes to make your submission. What the assessment contains, the eight criteria you are marked against, and why so many guides give the timing wrongly.

Published

You get 45 minutes to prepare and 15 minutes to make your submission to a judge who is in the room with you. You will be interrupted with questions while you are speaking.

That first pair of numbers is where most published guidance goes wrong. If you have read that advocacy "lasts 45 minutes", you have read a description of the preparation period, and planning a 45-minute argument on that basis is the single most expensive mistake you can make in this station.

What you are given

A case study, and an email telling you to conduct the advocacy and naming the court you are appearing in. Where the assessment calls for it, you also get a file of documents.

Nothing is hidden. This is the structural difference between advocacy and the client interview: in the interview, the deciding facts sit with the assessor playing your client and surface only if you ask the right question. In advocacy, the whole bundle is in front of you from the moment the preparation period starts. There is no information to extract. There is only what you do with what you already have.

The judge is played by a solicitor of England and Wales, and that same person marks you — on skills and on application of law together. In the interview the assessor marks skills only. Here, your law is being scored by the person you are arguing in front of.

Where advocacy sits in SQE2

SQE2 has 16 assessments: four oral, taken over two half-days, and twelve written over three. Two of the four oral assessments are advocacy:

| Day | Advocacy practice area | | --- | --- | | Day 1 | Dispute Resolution | | Day 2 | Criminal Law and Practice (Criminal Litigation) |

The other two oral assessments are client interviews with their attendance notes — Property Practice on Day 1, Wills and the Administration of Estates on Day 2. Advocacy and interview can come in either order within a day, so you cannot plan to warm up on one before the other.

The eight criteria

You are assessed against eight criteria: five on skills, three on application of law.

| # | Criterion | What it is actually asking | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | Language and behaviour | Courtroom register. "In my submission", not "I think" or "I believe". Formal, polite, not patronising. | | 2 | Clear and logical structure | A beginning, a middle and an end. Signpost what you are about to do, then do it, then draw the conclusion. | | 3 | Persuasive argument | Every submission tied to the order you are asking for. Argument, not evidence, and not your personal opinion. | | 4 | Engaging the court | Pace the judge can follow. Take the court to the document. Answer judicial questions, then return to your plan. | | 5 | All key relevant facts | The facts that carry the legal submissions — including the ones that hurt you. Not a recital of the file. | | 6 | Apply the law correctly | The right principles, applied to this client's case and to what the partner asked you to address. | | 7 | Apply the law comprehensively | Detailed enough: the issues, the risks, conclusions that are reasoned rather than asserted. | | 8 | Ethics and professional conduct | Spot the professional conduct issue and resolve it honestly. This is its own criterion, not a footnote to the law. |

Criterion 8 is the one candidates most often fail to treat as a criterion at all. It is scored separately from 6 and 7, which means you can apply the law impeccably and still drop a grade for not noticing the conduct point in front of you — your duty to draw the court's attention to adverse authority being the obvious example. The SRA's wording for all eight is on its Assessments in SQE2 page, and that wording is the authoritative version.

Ethics is deliberately unsignposted. The specification states that ethics and professional conduct are pervasive throughout SQE2 and that the issues will not be flagged — so there is no prompt telling you one is present. Finding it is part of the assessment.

How the grades work

Each of the eight criteria is graded A to F by a trained assessor making a global professional judgement against one standard: the just-competent Day One solicitor.

| Grade | Band | Marks | | --- | --- | --- | | A | Superior performance | 5 | | B | Clearly satisfactory | 4 | | C | Marginal pass | 3 | | D | Marginal fail | 2 | | E | Clearly unsatisfactory | 1 | | F | Poor performance | 0 |

Across all of SQE2, skills and application of law are weighted equally in your final mark, and ethics is counted inside the application of law half. Five of the eight advocacy criteria are skills and three are law — but that is the count of criteria in this station, not the weighting of your overall result.

Why "45 minutes" is wrong, and why so many sources say it

The error has a traceable source. The July 2020 assessment specification gives the 45-minute preparation period but does not state a separate submission window. Guidance written from that document, and anything written from that guidance, inherits the gap — and the natural reading of "45 minutes" next to the word advocacy is that the advocacy lasts 45 minutes.

The current specification is explicit about both numbers. If a source gives you one number for this station, it is out of date, and the practical consequence is severe: a candidate who prepares 45 minutes of material will be a third of the way through when told their time is up.

What the papers look like

The SRA's published samples show two quite different bundles, and the difference is worth preparing for.

The Criminal Litigation sample runs to six documents: a complainant's witness statement, a medical statement, the arresting officer's statement, a verbatim record of the police interview, the client's own written instructions, and the Sentencing Council guideline for the offence with its culpability and harm tables.

The Dispute Resolution sample carries three: the Particulars of Claim and a witness statement from each side's director. Its partner email also states what has deliberately not been supplied, and confirms that the omitted documents comply with the Civil Procedure Rules — which is what lets you reason about documents you cannot see rather than asking for them.

Two features recur in both, and both are deliberate:

  • The papers contradict each other on purpose. A complainant says she was pushed; the client says she tripped. A medical statement proves the injury but expressly cannot say what caused it. The factual dispute is real, which is what makes the station arguable rather than a recital.
  • The partner's email numbers your submissions. It lists what the judge will want addressed. That list is your structure, and departing from it costs you criterion 2 before you have said anything about the law.

How to prepare

Build the skeleton from the email, not from the bundle. The numbered submissions are the structure you will be marked on. Read them first, then go to the documents looking for what supports each one.

Time the real thing. Fifteen minutes is roughly 2,000 spoken words, and you will lose some of it to judicial questions. Rehearse to 12 minutes of material, not 15, and certainly not 45.

Place the case in the guideline rather than asserting an outcome. Where a sentencing guideline is supplied in full, the work is categorising culpability and harm and reasoning from the starting point. Asserting the sentence you want, without doing that, is the commonest way to lose criterion 7.

Plan the facts that hurt you. Criterion 5 asks for all key relevant facts. An advocate who omits the adverse fact has not hidden it — the judge has the bundle too, and is marking you on whether you dealt with it.

Rehearse being interrupted. Criterion 4 is scored on how you handle the question and get back to your plan, not on whether you were interrupted. Practise finishing the answer, then saying where you are returning to.

Say the conduct point out loud. If there is a professional conduct issue, name it and say how you are resolving it. Criterion 8 is scored on what the judge hears.

Advocacy is one of four oral assessments, alongside the client interview and attendance note. How the grades add up across all sixteen is on how SQE2 is marked.

Sources