BARBRI Co-CEO Lucie Allen on tracking struggling candidates, the skills firms still want on day one, and why GenAI training now sits alongside exam prep
Fear around the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) is never far from the surface, so when I sit down with BARBRI Co-CEO Lucie Allen ahead of LegalEdCon 2026, there is one point she is keen to stress early. For all the noise around pass rates, one trend is clear in BARBRI’s data: candidates who keep up with the course tend to succeed. “The more they complete the course, the more likely they are to succeed,” Allen explains.
That simple message sits behind quite a demanding reality. Allen points out that SQE1 asks students to master the seven core law subjects alongside much of the old LPC syllabus, before applying that knowledge across two days of multiple-choice assessments. It is, she admits, a style of testing many students will not have encountered before, and one that can feel disorienting even for well-prepared candidates.
So how does BARBRI spot those who may be slipping? The key data point, according to Allen, is whether a student is falling behind on completed study hours. BARBRI also tracks practice question and mock exam performance against benchmarked cohort averages, and that monitoring sits alongside a live progress dashboard for law firms and a Personal Study Plan for individual students, allowing both sides to keep a close eye on progress and intervene early where needed.
When warning signs do appear, BARBRI’s learning coaches can step in to work out what is going wrong and agree a plan with the student, sometimes in conjunction with the sponsor firm’s learning and development team. In more serious cases, that can mean deferring an exam sitting altogether, where the collective view is that a candidate simply is not yet ready.
A chief concern among firms and students alike, however, is how well the SQE actually prepares people for life in practice. The qualification is supposed to produce a day-one-ready solicitor, but Allen says firms are still reporting some missing pieces. BARBRI has been thinking carefully about that through its Junior Lawyers Competency Framework, developed with input from law firms and in-house teams and built around eight core skills, ranging from business awareness and knowledge management through to successful communication. The aim is to map learning back to the capabilities firms actually want to see, and it echoes a point raised repeatedly by practitioners: firms increasingly value candidates who are ready for the realities of practice from day one, not just capable of passing the exam.
So where are the gaps? Allen has several in mind. Judgement comes first, followed by written communication and legal research skills, then resilience, workload management, and the broader professional capabilities that make a junior lawyer genuinely useful from the moment they arrive. The underlying tension, she suggests, is the distance between passing an exam and knowing how to turn up on day one and just be ready to work.
The reason, in her view, is fairly straightforward. The SQE is doing a specific job: testing whether candidates can demonstrate the requisite knowledge and qualifying work experience. It is not designed to assess every softer or business-critical skill that matters in practice. And when students are already spending ten or twenty hours a week preparing, often alongside full-time work, there is limited room to fit everything else in.
BARBRI’s answer has been its work-ready skills series, currently at 10 modules and about to double to 20. The best moment to deploy it, Allen says, is in the early stages of a training contract, once candidates have come through the SQE process and find themselves in the building wondering what comes next. The modules focus on the things that often go unspoken in formal training: office politics, making good first impressions, developing a growth mindset, and learning how to give feedback up the chain. The training is designed to be bite-sized and in the moment, rather than another two-hour lecture added to an already full schedule.
That speaks to a wider retention point Allen is keen to raise. Junior lawyers, she stresses, want more than a pay cheque. They want clear development pathways, genuine flexibility, and training that fits around the realities of modern legal work rather than cutting across them.
I ask what aspiring solicitors can do before they ever reach that stage. Allen urges them to seek out practical experience wherever it can be found, and not only in legal settings. Hospitality is a sector she references more than once, because it teaches people how to deal with difficult situations and demanding environments in ways that translate directly into practice. Just as valuable is speaking to as many people as possible about what legal life is really like, building a clear-eyed picture before training begins. And once a training contract is offered, the advice is simple: lean into every opportunity that comes with it.
The final stretch of our conversation turns to generative AI, an area where junior lawyers are increasingly expected to arrive with some degree of fluency. Here again, BARBRI has opted for short, practical modules developed in partnership with law firms. The focus, Allen explains, is on effective prompting and ethical use, as well as more specific applications in drafting and communications. The training is deliberately technology-agnostic, and BARBRI has also been bringing legal tech providers into sessions and hackathons so that students can get genuine hands-on exposure, rather than learning about tools in the abstract. It is, in many ways, a microcosm of the broader philosophy: practical, grounded, and built around what the profession actually needs.
Lucie Allen will be speaking at the ‘SQE town hall’ at LegalEdCon 2026, Legal Cheek’s annual future of legal education and training conference, which takes place in-person on Thursday 14 May at Kings Place, London. Final release tickets for the Conference can be purchased here.
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