My SQE1 Experience
How I Passed SQE1 While Working Full Time in BigLaw
My study schedule, BARBRI experience, mock-exam strategy, mistakes, and advice for lawyers trying to prepare for SQE1 around a demanding full-time job.
When I decided to take SQE1, I was already working full time in BigLaw.
I did not have months to disappear into a library. I could not build my life around an exam schedule. Client deadlines were still client deadlines. Deals did not care that I needed to learn English land law. Some weeks I had plenty of time to study. Other weeks, work took over completely.
And that was exactly why I decided to do it when I did.
I was early enough in my career that I could still realistically give up nights and weekends for something like this. I knew that as I became more senior, my time was probably going to become more valuable, more fragmented, and harder to control.
If I wanted to qualify in England and Wales, this felt like my window.
At the time, I did not know exactly where the qualification would lead. I had personal reasons for wanting the option of living in London, but moving there still felt more aspirational than inevitable.
My thinking was simpler:
Get the qualification. Leave the door open. See where it leads.
So I bought an SQE1 preparation course in November, studied around work for the better part of the next eight months, sat FLK1 and FLK2 in Dallas in July 2026, and passed both in the top quintile.
The SRA divides candidates into five performance quintiles, with Quintile 1 representing the highest-scoring 20% of candidates in that assessment.
This is how I did it—and what I would do differently if I had to start again.
November 2025 → July 2026
BARBRI
£2,930.80
Full-time BigLaw associate
Dallas, Texas
Passed FLK1 and FLK2 — Quintile 1 in both
First, a Caveat: I Am a Good Test Taker
I think this is important to say upfront because study advice becomes misleading when people pretend everyone starts in the same place.
I have generally been a good standardized test taker.
Multiple-choice exams do not particularly intimidate me. I am comfortable working quickly through questions, eliminating answers, making judgment calls when I am uncertain, and moving on rather than getting stuck.
That absolutely affected the way I approached SQE1.
It does not mean I already knew the law being tested. I very much did not.
But I was not simultaneously trying to learn English law and figure out how to function inside a long, high-stakes multiple-choice examination.
If multiple-choice testing is a weakness for you, you should factor that into your preparation. You may need more question practice, more timed work, or simply more time than I did.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make with someone else's SQE study plan is copying the schedule without accounting for the person behind it.
Why I Took SQE1 While Working in BigLaw
There was probably never going to be a convenient time.
That became obvious pretty quickly.
BigLaw schedules are unpredictable by nature. You can have a relatively manageable week and then receive an email that completely rearranges the next three days.
I knew that.
But I also knew waiting was unlikely to make the problem easier.
As a junior associate, I could still look at a Saturday and think, I can spend three hours studying today.
The further I advanced, the less confident I was that nights and weekends would remain mine to use that way.
So rather than waiting for some imaginary stretch of free time, I decided to start.
That ended up being one of the most important decisions I made.
You do not need an empty calendar to prepare for SQE1.
You need a long enough runway that losing a week—or even two weeks—does not destroy your entire plan.
Prep Course
Why I Chose BARBRI
I used BARBRI for my U.S. bar preparation and had a good experience with it, so it was naturally one of the first SQE providers I considered.
I also looked at QLTS School and tried some of its sample materials.
The QLTS materials were substantive and clearly work well for many candidates. They simply did not fit the way I preferred to learn as well as BARBRI did.
What I wanted most was structure.
I wanted someone else to decide:
Here is what you need to learn today. Here is the video. Here is the reading. Here is what comes next.
The last thing I wanted after a full day of legal work was to sit down at night and design my own curriculum.
BARBRI gave me that.
I paid £2,930.80 for the course myself, and having completed it, I would choose BARBRI again.
That does not mean I think everybody should choose BARBRI.
One recurring theme in candidate discussions is that people experience the major providers differently. Some candidates particularly like BARBRI's structured teaching and study plan, while others prefer the volume or difficulty of QLTS's question and mock materials. Those are subjective experiences, not reasons to declare one universally “better.” Recent BARBRI reviewers similarly frequently mention its structure and study planning, while some comment that they wanted more representative or harder practice questions.
My advice is to try the sample materials before spending thousands of pounds.
Do not choose a provider because somebody on Reddit passed with it.
Choose the provider that makes you most likely to sit down consistently and learn.
Read recent BARBRI reviews
See a candidate discussion comparing BARBRI and QLTS
The Study Plan
What My Study Schedule Actually Looked Like
I started in November.
That sounds wonderfully responsible in hindsight.
It did not mean I followed a flawless eight-month study plan.
November
Start
Holidays / Work Interruptions
Fell behind
Spring
More concentrated studying
Final Weeks
Mocks and review
July
FLK1 / FLK2
The holidays came. Work got busy. Life happened.
I fell behind.
At various points, there were stretches of roughly two weeks where I barely studied at all.
And at one point I managed to look at BARBRI's schedule and discover that I was approximately a month behind.
That was probably the moment when the whole project felt most questionable.
Work was piling up at the same time. The course was telling me how far behind I was. And there was no obvious place on my calendar where I could magically recover a month.
The solution was not particularly sophisticated.
I kept going.
A typical weekday involved somewhere between zero and two hours of SQE work. On a weekend day, I might do three or four hours.
I was not spending eight hours every Saturday and Sunday studying.
That was actually part of what made the plan sustainable.
Because I started far enough in advance, I could usually study in relatively manageable chunks rather than trying to recreate law school finals for six straight months.
I still lost some very nice spring weekends to the SQE.
But I did not have to put the rest of my life completely on hold.
The Best Change I Made: Studying Before Work
Initially, it was easy to imagine that I would simply work all day and study afterward.
Sometimes I did.
But there is an obvious problem with that plan when you work in BigLaw:
You do not always control when “after work” begins.
Even when you technically have time at night, there is a difference between having 90 free minutes and having 90 useful mental minutes.
Eventually, I realized that morning studying was much more reliable.
Wake up.
Make coffee.
Watch a video or two.
Do a section of the course.
Then start work.
It became almost ritualistic.
That is probably the single scheduling habit I would most strongly recommend to another busy lawyer.
Do not rely entirely on finding time.
Attach studying to something you already do.
If your morning coffee means one BARBRI lecture, you stop having to negotiate with yourself every day about whether you are going to study.
I Followed BARBRI’s Course—But Not Always in the Exact Order
I ultimately completed 100% of the BARBRI course.
I also followed its overall recommended progression very closely.
But there was one adjustment I made when I started getting behind.
BARBRI would often present practice questions immediately after a learning segment.
Initially, I did everything as it appeared.
Eventually, I realized there were times when the highest-value use of my limited study time was to keep learning new material rather than stopping for every question set immediately.
So when I was behind, I sometimes deferred the practice questions.
Early approach
Complete work as presented
Later approach
Sometimes defer practice questions and return to them later
That accomplished two things.
First, it let me keep progressing through the syllabus rather than becoming stuck perfecting one subject while entire areas of law remained untouched.
Second, it left me with more practice material available toward the end, when questions became much more valuable because I had actually seen the full syllabus.
I would not interpret that as advice to skip practice questions.
Quite the opposite.
By the end, questions became one of the most important parts of my preparation.
I simply stopped believing every question had to be completed at the exact moment the course first displayed it.
Learning English Law as an American Lawyer
Some subjects felt surprisingly comfortable.
Contract. Tort. Parts of property. Ethics.
The terminology might differ, and the rules certainly were not always identical, but I at least had somewhere in my brain to attach the concepts.
Other subjects felt much further removed from my U.S. legal education.
And then there was a third category that I actually found more dangerous:
subjects that looked familiar but were not familiar enough.
Business law was a good example.
A U.S.-trained lawyer can look at certain concepts and think, Oh, I know what this is.
Sometimes that helps.
Sometimes you have just discovered a very efficient way to confidently choose the wrong answer.
The false parallels matter.
Felt familiar
- Contract
- Tort
- Parts of Property
- Ethics
Felt different
Subjects much further removed from my U.S. legal education
Dangerous false parallels
- Business Law
One thing SQE1 forced me to do was stop asking:
What is the rule I remember?
and start asking:
What is the English rule the exam is testing?
That mental separation became increasingly important as the course went on.
Practice
Practice Questions Became More Important Near the End
My preparation evolved over time.
Earlier in the process, the priority was learning the law.
Closer to the exam, the priority became proving that I could retrieve and apply it under question conditions.
By the end of my preparation, I had worked through BARBRI's question material, a separate additional 100-question set, and ReviseSQE mocks.
I also used the official SQE sample questions.
Those official questions are particularly useful because they show the style of single-best-answer questions used by the assessment. The SQE site now publishes a much larger set of sample and previously used questions and expressly says they are intended to illustrate the style and difficulty candidates can expect.
Completed BARBRI question material
Used
Used
Used
My final few weeks therefore became much less about consuming new material and much more about:
take a mock → see what I missed → review the rule → move on.
I was not trying to eliminate every gap in my knowledge.
That is impossible.
Eventually, I had to remind myself:
Focus on what you know.
At some point, repeatedly panicking about the universe of things you might have forgotten becomes less useful than becoming reliable on the enormous amount you already learned.
The Mistake I Would Fix: Get More Mocks Earlier
If I could change one part of my preparation, this would probably be it.
I would secure access to my supplemental mock exams earlier.
I had planned to use free QLTS mock materials as additional practice, but discovered that access to some free materials could close as the exam approached.
That is exactly the kind of problem you do not want to discover during your final revision period.
So my recommendation is simple:
If you know you want to use third-party mocks, sample questions, or question banks, figure out access well before the final month.
Download anything you are permitted to download.
Bookmark what you need.
Know when access expires.
Do not wait until your final two weeks to discover that the practice resource you planned around is no longer available.
The Final Few Weeks
By the final stretch, I was not trying to become an expert in every area of English law.
I was trying to pass SQE1.
That distinction mattered.
My preparation became increasingly question-driven.
I did mocks.
I reviewed what I got wrong.
I went back to weak areas where necessary.
And I tried very hard not to let every bad set of questions convince me that I was doomed.
That last part is harder than it sounds.
You can answer twenty questions, miss a cluster of them, and suddenly convince yourself that you have learned nothing over the previous eight months.
Then you do another set and perform well.
At some point I had to stop using every practice score as a referendum on whether I was going to pass.
The objective was to identify weaknesses—not predict the future.
Exam Day
What the Actual Exam Felt Like
I sat both FLK1 and FLK2 at a Pearson testing center in Dallas.
They were approximately a week apart.
Dallas, Texas
July 2026
July 2026
Pearson VUE
There were only two of us at the center taking the SQE, which made the whole thing feel slightly surreal. Most people around us were presumably there for completely different professional examinations.
The Pearson staff were extremely nice and supportive.
Otherwise, it felt like what it was: a long standardized exam at a Pearson center.
The most important thing I can say about the actual questions is that, to me, they felt more like the SRA's own sample questions than anything else.
That is another reason I think candidates should spend meaningful time with the official samples. The SRA says its sample questions are specifically designed to illustrate the type of questions used in SQE1; some of the currently published pre-tested questions were actually used in prior SQE1 assessments.
How I Felt Walking Out
I thought I probably passed.
I also had absolutely no idea.
Those two feelings can coexist surprisingly well.
It reminded me of the U.S. bar exam.
For the next few days, questions kept resurfacing in my head.
What did I answer on that one?
Was that actually the rule?
Then, of course, I would look something up and either feel temporarily vindicated or discover that I had been wrong and immediately extrapolate that one question into catastrophic failure.
This is not a useful post-exam activity.
I did it anyway.
Overall, I felt reasonably confident.
But that confidence was based much more on instinct and hope than on any ability to calculate whether I had passed.
Eventually there was nothing left to do but wait.
The Result
The Result
FLK1
Pass
FLK2
Pass
When the results came back, I had passed both.
And not barely.
My results placed me in Quintile 1 for both FLK1 and FLK2, meaning the top 20% of candidates for each assessment.
I mention that for one reason:
My study plan worked for me.
It does not mean everyone should copy it hour for hour.
I started with certain advantages. I am comfortable taking tests. I had already survived U.S. law school and a bar exam. I was able to fund a structured prep course. And despite a demanding job, I started early enough to absorb periods where work completely disrupted my schedule.
Someone with a different starting point may need a different plan.
What I Would Do Differently
I would still choose BARBRI.
I would still start months in advance.
I would still aim to finish the entire course.
I would still shift increasingly toward practice questions as the exam approached.
The biggest change I would make is locking down my supplemental mocks earlier.
I would also worry less when I fell behind.
Keep
- BARBRI
- Start months in advance
- Finish the course
- Shift toward questions near the exam
Change
- Secure supplemental mocks earlier
- Worry less about falling behind
Being a month behind BARBRI's ideal schedule felt disastrous at the time.
It was not.
A study schedule is a planning tool.
It is not a prophecy.
If work blows up your schedule for ten days, the answer is not to spend the next ten days thinking about how far behind you are.
Open the course.
Do the next thing.
Keep moving.
My Advice
My Advice for Another BigLaw Associate Taking SQE1
There are four things I would tell another U.S. lawyer trying to do this alongside BigLaw.
First
Choose a course that fits how you actually learn.
I wanted structure and liked BARBRI. Someone else may prefer QLTS or another provider. The provider you will actually use consistently is more valuable than the one somebody online declares objectively superior.
Second
Be realistic about the time commitment.
SQE1 is not something I would treat as a casual side project simply because you already passed a U.S. bar. There is too much unfamiliar law.
Third
Build studying into a routine instead of waiting for free time.
A video with your morning coffee is better than an ambitious three-hour evening study block that disappears every time a client emails you at 6:30.
Fourth
Give yourself enough runway for work to go wrong.
There were periods when I barely studied for roughly two weeks. Starting early meant those periods were frustrating rather than fatal.
That last point may be the most important one for BigLaw lawyers.
You cannot guarantee that work will cooperate with your SQE schedule.
You can build a schedule that survives when it doesn't.
How Much Did SQE1 Take Over My Life?
A meaningful amount.
There is no point pretending otherwise.
For months, SQE preparation occupied a lot of nights and weekends.
I missed some beautiful spring weekends because I needed to study.
There were mornings when I would have preferred not to start my day learning English law before beginning my actual legal job.
But because I spread the work over a long period, it rarely required giving up an entire day.
Usually it was a few hours at a time.
That made a huge difference psychologically.
The SQE became something that lived alongside the rest of my life rather than replacing it entirely.
And it had an endpoint.
Can You Pass SQE1 While Working Full Time in BigLaw?
Yes.
I did.
But I would add an important second sentence:
You cannot assume it will be easy simply because you are already a U.S. lawyer.
Being a lawyer helps.
Being a good test taker helps.
Having passed a U.S. bar helps.
None of those things teaches you the English and Welsh law that SQE1 expects you to know.
The challenge is not necessarily finding eight hours a day to study.
It is finding one hour today, another hour tomorrow, three hours Saturday, and then doing it again and again for months—even after work gets busy and the schedule stops looking perfect.
That was ultimately my strategy.
Nothing magical.
Start early.
Use a structured course.
Learn the material.
Do a lot of questions.
Review what you miss.
And keep going when work inevitably knocks you off schedule.
For me, that was enough to turn an idea I once wasn't sure was realistic into two passing results.
And eventually, into something much bigger than an exam.
Keep Reading
Where Should You Go Next?
Need the big-picture qualification process?
The U.S. Lawyer’s Guide to the SQE
Choosing a provider?
BARBRI vs. QLTS School for U.S. Lawyers
Coming soon
Finished SQE1 and considering your next step?
The SQE2 Exemption for U.S.-Qualified Lawyers
Coming soon
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