Qualifying Experience

What is qualifying experience?

Qualifying experience is the legal experience that helps you develop your competence to meet the entry requirements to become a chartered legal executive. Gaining appropriate varied legal experience is vital in developing your knowledge and skills to enable you to present examples of your own work as part of a successful work-based learning portfolio.

To meet the qualifying experience requirements for admission, you need to show that you have undertaken ‘work that contributes to the provision of legal services’ for at least 2,300 hours and have served at least 1 year in the Graduate or CILEX Member-Advanced Paralegal grade of membership.

Although it’s not compulsory to have your experience assessed before you apply to become a chartered legal executive, we strongly advise that you do. If you don’t have your experience assessed before you submit your work-based learning portfolio, we won’t assess your portfolio until we have confirmed whether you have accrued sufficient qualifying experience. This can make the application process longer, particularly if your role and work history haven’t met our requirements.

How do you demonstrate your qualifying experience?

We ask you to demonstrate your qualifying experience by completing the qualifying experience application form and paying the fee. You need to complete the application form as fully as possible so that we can judge from the information you have provided whether you have been undertaking work that contributes to the provision of legal services and, if so, the number of hours qualifying experience you may have accrued.

This is because when you apply to be a chartered legal executive, you need to show that you have completed 2,300 hours qualifying experience.

Character and suitability requirements to become a chartered legal executive

By applying to have your experience assessed against the qualifying experience criteria, CILEx Regulation recognises this as an intention to apply to become a chartered legal executive in the future.

As a result, if you are a member of CILEX at the time you apply to have your experience assessed against the qualifying experience criteria, we will ask you some questions about your background through a statement of prior conduct in the application form. By completing this declaration, you are confirming that you want your suitability for admission as a chartered legal executive to be assessed by CILEx Regulation in accordance with the Enforcement Rules and in line with the Code of Conduct.

This means that the Rehabilitation of Offenders’ Act will not apply to you and that any spent convictions/cautions (that are not protected) will be considered as part of the assessment.

Notice for applicants who are not currently members of CILEX

If you are not a member of CILEX when you apply to have your experience considered against the qualifying experience criteria, you are not required to complete the prior conduct questions and you will not have your character and suitability assessed to become a chartered legal executive as part of the application.

Instead, assessment of your character and suitability will take place at the point you apply to become a member of CILEX. If you have prior conduct, this may affect your ability to become a member of CILEX and/or to be authorised as a chartered legal executive. Information on the CILEX membership grades can be found on the CILEX website.

If you are not currently a member of CILEX but would still like to apply to have your experience assessed, then please complete our non-member qualifying experience application form.

The application process

If you think you are ready to make your application to have your qualifying experience assessed, please complete the qualifying experience application form.

Once you have completed all the paperwork, please send your application to CILEx Regulation for assessment with details of how you wish to pay the application fee.

We may need to ask you for more information in order to clarify some of the information you have provided, once we have made a decision, we will write to you to let you know the outcome. This will be either:

Approved
Refused
Referred to the Admissions and Licensing Committee

Where your application is referred to the Committee, we will schedule this for the next available meeting. We will endeavour to contact all applicants whose application have been heard within 10 working days. Please note we are unable to communicate the outcome of your application by telephone.

For more information on the work of the Admissions and Licensing Committee, please click here.

Next steps

We hope you are satisfied by the decision you have received. However, if you are unhappy with the decision, you can appeal the decision. More information on the appeals process can be found here.

For further information, please contact us today to request a call back from one of our team.