Coventry Law School

The law school offers modern facilities, such as a moot court room, lecture and seminar facilities and social and study spaces. The moot room provides students with the opportunity to experience a modern courtroom space within an academic environment. Students can also gain work experience through the pro-bono law clinics available at the university.  The law school collaborates with the Central England Law Centre in order to offer a powerful professional element to your learning, through our Law Employment and Advocacy clinics. Students who participate in the clinics get involved with everything that the solicitors do at the Law Centre with supervisors who are currently working in practice and experts in specific areas of law. They get hands-on-experience doing reserved legal activities, providing supervised advice and assistance to members of the public. Time spent on some of these volunteering projects may count as Qualifying Work Experience (QWE) and the staff that run them may help to support students with registering QWE with the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

SQE preparation for law and non-law graduates

At Coventry, students can prepare for the SQE via two course routes:

• LLM Professional Legal Practice
• PgDip Understanding Legal Practice

The LLM Professional Legal Practice is for law graduates and can be completed full-time or part-time. During the first six modules, students will undertake the necessary study to prepare them for SQE 1, whilst also developing the skills for SQE 2. The course culminates in a case study project module specifically focusing on SQE 2 preparation. This module will see students immersed in a simulated law firm environment to hone their skills and expertise.

The PgDip Understanding Legal Practice focuses on preparation for SQE 1 and is ideal for a student who already has some legal practice experience. The course is offered on a full-time or part time basis, so that a student can fit their preparation for SQE 1 around their work commitments.

As well as preparing you for SQE, the LLM and PGDip courses also aim to prepare students for the CILEX (Chartered Institute of Legal Executives) Professional Qualification Professional Stage. This gives students the option of pursuing qualification as a solicitor or CILEX lawyer after graduation. Becoming a CILEX lawyer is a relatively new route for those looking to get into practicing law. The structure of CPQ means CILEX Lawyers qualify with practice rights in at least one specialist area of law. By contrast, solicitors qualify as generalists and only begin to specialise post-qualification. For their employers and clients, this means that CILEX Lawyers are ready to deliver specialist expertise and add value from much earlier in their careers.

For students with a non-law background or who have studied law in another jurisdiction, there is the PGCert in Principles of Law. This intensive course studied over 13 weeks, is specifically designed to provide you with the understanding of the relevant legal principles required to undertake SQE 1 and 2. Students who successfully complete this course can proceed directly on to one of the other programmes listed above.