New route to practice rights (ULaw)

Chartered Legal Executives can apply to obtain practice rights in one of the following reserved or regulated areas of activity:

  • Reserved Instrument (Conveyancing) activities
  • Probate activities
  • Litigation & Advocacy for civil, criminal, or family proceedings
  • Immigration and Asylum activities

Following approval from the Legal Services Board, we have now launched our new training and assessment route as an alternative to the existing portfolio route. The new route is being offered by The University of Law and all Chartered Legal Executives with at least 5 years’ qualifying employment experience have the option to choose this route to obtain additional practice rights.

If you are a CILEx Practitioner seeking litigation rights, you will need to qualify as an advocate. Once your initial application has been assessed as competent, you will be issued with a certificate of eligibility to attend the advocacy course.

You may also qualify as an advocate if you are a Chartered Legal Executive, employed by an authorised law firm and you would like to undertake advocacy. The first step using this route is to complete the application for a certificate of eligibility to attend the course – which includes an assessment of your current experience.

Once you have a certificate of eligibility, you will need to undertake a week-long course of study in advocacy run by a CILEx Regulation accredited advocacy provider, followed an assessment at the end of the week to confirm you are competent to practise.

Why do Fellows have to apply for practice rights?

Until 2014, Chartered Legal Executives were unable to undertake reserved or regulated legal activities. In 2014, CRL secured the ability to authorise suitably qualified and competent individuals by reserved or regulated specialism.

CRL as the regulator is required to assure itself that individuals seeking additional rights are competent to undertake these activities unsupervised. The issue of the practising certificate then signals competence to the consumer.

When originally introduced, the additional requirements were based on portfolio assessment; however, CRL recognised that this may be onerous.

CRL has now introduced the new assessment with the University of Law which enables quick and simple assessment of competence to enable us to authorise for these additional rights.

Find out if you’re eligible

If you are interested in either the new training and assessment route or the new assessment only route with The University of Law, and would like to register for an assessment session, then please first complete the Certificate of Eligibility form. Once you have completed the form, please email it to us at: practicerights@cilexregulation.org.uk

The form asks you to provide information about you and your qualifying employment.  This will enable CILEx Regulation to assess your eligibility for the The University of Law programmes. Once eligibility has been confirmed, CILEx Regulation will provide your details to the University of Law who will issue you with a link to the eStore where you will be able to enrol onto the relevant programme.

More information on the options available are set out in the diagram below (and at the bottom of this page):

Please note that whatever route is taken, those who have applied for advocacy rights have to undertake an advocacy skills course (unless they have already undertaken an equivalent).  Those who have been authorised with advocacy rights have to undergo a renewal process one year after authorisation, to demonstrate how they have used their advocacy rights.

Practice rights routes

Video introductions

The University of Law have produced a useful video presentation that helps to explain the new routes to Practice Rights:  The Alternative Route to Advanced Practice Rights.

CRL Practice Rights webinars (in conjunction with CILEX)

Civil, Family and Criminal Litigation

Conveyancing and Probate


Portfolio route

Assessment only


Training and Assessment route

 

General guidance notes

Note 1: Candidates book through the University of Law e-store.

Following booking, candidates will be required to complete an additional step of Online Enrolment with the University (candidates will be sent a link to do this).

This Online Enrolment must be completed by candidates prior to the Start date otherwise candidates will not be able to commence studies for that period (e.g. September) and will need to start in a later period (e.g. January).

Accordingly, best practice is not to leave the e-store booking to the last date identified because the further step of Online Enrolment will still need to be completed before the Start date. Please book as early as possible.

Note 2: The Summative (final) Assessment has two components – a Skills component (an oral exercise followed by a written exercise) lasting 2 hours and a Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) exam lasting 90 minutes. In an Assessment period, the Skills component will be individually scheduled for candidates for a 2 hour slot during that period; the MCQ exam will be on the last day of the relevant Assessment period, as identified above.

As an example, for the December 2023 assessment point, the 2 hour Skills component will be scheduled 4 December inclusive to 13 December 2023 inclusive (weekdays), and the MCQ exam will be on 15 December 2023.

Any questions?

If you require any further information about the new assessment routes, please contact us at: practicerights@cilexregulation.org.uk and our team will be happy to assist.