SQE2 legal drafting: format, timing and the five criteria

Forty-five minutes to draft a legal document or part of one. What you may be asked to do, the five criteria, and why its law criteria are worded differently from every other station.

Published

45 minutes to draft a legal document, or parts of one, on a computer. Five criteria: two on skills, three on application of law. It has the fewest criteria of any SQE2 assessment.

What you may be asked to do

Three shapes, and the specification allows any of them:

  • draft from a precedent
  • amend a document that has already been drafted
  • draft with neither — from nothing

The third is the one candidates prepare for least and the one that exposes whether you know what the document is for.

The five criteria

| # | Criterion | Type | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 | Clear, precise, concise and acceptable language | Skills | | 2 | Structure the document appropriately and logically | Skills | | 3 | Draft a document which is legally correct | Application of law | | 4 | Draft a document which is legally comprehensive | Application of law | | 5 | Identify ethical and professional conduct issues and resolve them | Application of law |

Criteria 3 and 4 are worded differently from every other station. Elsewhere you apply the law to the client's situation. Here the document itself must be legally correct and legally comprehensive. The thing being marked is the artefact, not your reasoning about it — a clause that would not do what it is for is wrong, however well you understood the point.

"Comprehensive" is where drafting is usually lost. A document that handles the obvious case and is silent on the foreseeable one is incomplete, and silence is visible to a marker in a way that a missing sentence in a letter is not.

How to prepare

Know what each document is for. Before drafting a clause, be able to say what goes wrong if it is absent. That question answers both correctness and comprehensiveness.

Precedents are a starting point, not an answer. Where one is supplied, the marks are in what you change and what you delete. Leaving an inapplicable clause in is a defect in the artefact.

Structure counts for its own criterion. Definitions before they are used, obligations grouped, machinery after substance. It is 20% of the grid here, a weight it does not carry anywhere else.

Write less. "Clear, precise, concise" is one criterion. Drafting long is not drafting comprehensively — it is usually how precision is lost.

Watch for the conduct point, which in drafting often sits in who the document is for and what you are being asked to put in it.

Drafting is one of four written assessments, alongside legal writing, legal research and case and matter analysis.

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