In-house and SQE: a Match Made in Heaven
In-house has always had something to offer someone starting out in law. The variety, the closeness to the business, the chance to see the results of your work in real-time.
What's changed is how well the route to qualification lines up with it. Although in-house was always a good place to learn and grow as a solicitor, it hasn’t always had an accessible route to qualification attached to it. The SQE route has changed this. Marrying the SQE route with obtaining your Qualifying Work Experience (QWE) in-house is a much more practical way to qualification, and here are some of the reasons why you should consider it.
Flexibility is the whole point
The SQE route requires two years (or full-time equivalent) of QWE, and that experience can be built across up to four different organisations. This QWE can be obtained before your exams, during or after, in whatever order works for you.
This flexibility opens up a lot more than people realise. Fixed-term in-house paralegal roles for example, where they would previously have been shunned, fit this perfectly…six months here, six months there, each one counting towards your two years. You can use that structure to try private practice and in-house and see which one actually suits you, rather than guessing and committing blind. You can work across four completely different businesses and industries, tech, financial services, retail, a law firm, and get a real feel for where you want to land before you qualify. Or you can stay in one in-house role for the full two years if that's what you want. All of it counts, as long as the work meets the competencies and is signed-off.
Getting it signed off is easier than people expect too. You need a solicitor willing to confirm the experience meets the SRA's definition of legal activity. The key about this is being upfront about it from day one. Tell your employer this is what you're building towards, agree roughly what you'll be working on, and make sure what you're doing actually hits the competencies the SRA wants to see. Sort that early and sign-off should be straightforward.
In-house work
In-house is not a watered-down version of private practice, rather it usually includes a broader spectrum of work.
A legal assistant or paralegal in an in-house team can touch on contract review, commercial negotiations, data protection, employment queries, disputes, compliance, corporate governance and more. In a single week, you might cover four different competency areas the SRA wants to see.
For someone building QWE, breadth is gold. It allows you to learn as much as possible at the point in your career when you have the opportunity to decide what you would like to pursue further. In-house teams tend to hand you exactly that kind of variety, and often earlier than a firm would, too.
No training contract bottleneck
The training contract market has always been brutal. Thousands of law students, a fraction of the roles, decisions made two years in advance. There’s a lot that can be said about the traditional process, but this article is not the place.
QWE doesn't work like that. Although the majority of firms are still structuring qualification routes this way, you don't need to win a formal training contract place to qualify. You need a role, paid or voluntary, where you're doing qualifying legal work and a solicitor is willing to sign it off. In-house departments hire paralegals and legal assistants constantly, often without the same formalised, oversubscribed process that law firms run.
For candidates from backgrounds without a network to lean on, this creates a real opportunity. It's a structural shift in who gets access to build the two years they need.
The employer benefit
Although there are a lot of hiring managers that care, in-house teams that offer QWE aren't just being generous. They're building a pipeline for succession planning.
Bringing in a paralegal who's working towards SQE and letting their role count as QWE costs a business very little and gives them a genuinely invested junior who's motivated to develop across competencies. Compare that to the overhead of running a formal training contract scheme, and it's an easy calculation for a lot of legal departments, particularly smaller ones that could never justify a traditional trainee cohort. Don’t forget - in-house teams are usually tight on budgets, so this lends itself well.
More in-house teams are open to QWE conversations than you think, because it works for them too.
What this means for your career
If you're eyeing the SQE route and wondering whether in-house is a legitimate way in, it is. Arguably, it's one of the better ones.
Just because something is flexibile, it should not be seen as lesser than. Working in-house and taking the SQE route together is not a shortcut, it's a different door into the same profession. The SRA permits this and it is not a workaround. It is a genuinely accepted route and it should be shouted about more.
Over to you..
Nobody needs a fixed training contract to prove they belong in law, and the two years ahead of you don't have to look like anyone else's. The route in is more flexible than it looks from the outside, and the work you do now, wherever you do it, counts for more than you think. Be deliberate about what you're building, be upfront about where you're headed, and keep choosing the roles that actually get you there. Qualify the way that you want to.