On 8 October 2026 the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), which regulates solicitors in England and Wales, opened a consultation on rewriting the Statement of Solicitor Competence. It closes at 23.59 on Thursday 3 December 2026. The Statement is how the SRA describes what a competent solicitor must be able to do, and if you supervise others, use AI, weigh competing duties or train people, the proposals place extra emphasis on what you do. I am not going to walk through the consultation paper, which the SRA has already done. I want to explain why I think you should respond, and where I think the proposals could be stronger.
The Statement has four parts: ethics, professionalism and judgement; technical legal practice; working with other people; and managing yourself and your work. It underpins the content of the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE), the assessment candidates now sit to qualify as solicitors, and it is also a tool solicitors use when they assess what they need to learn to keep their competence up to date, which the SRA calls continuing competence. The SRA is separately proposing a rule that would require every solicitor to keep a record of that learning from the start of the 2027/28 practising year, subject to its analysis of the responses and the approval of the Legal Services Board, so the evidence of continuing competence is going to matter more from that point. I wrote about that consultation in The state of competence: nobody asked whether it worked.
What is on the table
The SRA groups its proposed changes to the Statement under four headings: technology and AI, professional conduct and ethics, supervision, and health and wellbeing. There are smaller changes on equality, diversity and inclusion, and a rewrite of the language throughout in plain English. The Threshold Standard, which sets the level at which the competences are to be performed on qualification, is not proposed to change, although the SRA invites views on it.
Why I would like you to respond
In my experience, individual practitioners rarely respond to regulatory consultations, even when the outcome shapes their working lives directly. This one does significantly. The Statement of Solicitor Competence is the benchmark for the qualifying examination and for the way solicitors plan their own learning, and, if the recording rule goes ahead, for the way they show it. The people who supervise trainees, use AI tools in daily work, manage teams under pressure, face competing duties and train others are the people best placed to say whether the proposed wording matches practice.
The SRA drew up its proposals after six focus groups in early 2026 involving more than 140 professionals, among them law firm representatives, training providers, educational institutions and legal academics. Even if every one of them were a practising solicitor, although many were not, that would be less than 1% of the 182,070 practising solicitors on the SRA’s own data. The proposals have so far been informed by the views of a very small part of the profession. Beth Black, the SRA’s Director of Education and Training, has said that the SRA wants to hear a wide range of views. The Threshold Standard shows why: the SRA’s reason for leaving it unchanged is that it has had no feedback, so silence is in effect counted as agreement.
Not a rule, but not just guidance either
The SRA is careful to say that it is not seeking any change to its rules or regulatory arrangements. It describes its Standards and Regulations, including the codes of conduct, as the binding rules, and says it must take care not to introduce a new obligation into the Statement. That sounds reassuring until you read what else the SRA says about the document. It says the Statement is “used as a tool by solicitors as part of our continuing competence requirements”, and in its 2026 annual assessment of continuing competence the SRA says it now looks at whether solicitors use the Statement when they plan their learning. If a recording rule follows from the earlier consultation mentioned above, the Statement becomes the obvious reference point for assessing a solicitor’s continuing competence. In this way, it seems to me, a document that is formally not binding can still decide what a solicitor is expected to be able to show. The consultation paper does not mention the recording proposal at all. What the recording proposal does to the Statement’s standing may create uncertainty for the profession, and I think responses should address it.
Technology and AI: where is the confidentiality risk?
The SRA considered a standalone technology competence and decided against it for now. It reports a strong consensus that the Statement should reflect technology and AI explicitly, but mixed feedback on whether that needs a competence of its own. Embedding the references in existing competences is, in the SRA’s words, its “current view”. AI appears in four places: the introduction to maintaining competence (A2), checking research outputs (B2(d)), drafting (B4(a)) and supervision (C4(d)). That leaves the question open for solicitors to tell the SRA whether they think technology and AI need a competence of their own.
In my earlier blog, Three days apart: what the SRA published, and what it left out, I noted that the SRA’s 2026 annual assessment of continuing competence did not mention AI at all, although the SRA had issued its warning notice on the misuse of AI three days before. The Statement is a different document, and here AI is clearly in view. I think the coverage is thin in one respect, though.
The gap I see is confidentiality. The warning notice gave two concerns: false content and citations produced by AI, and client confidentiality when data is entered into AI tools. The proposed wording deals with the first, by requiring outputs to be checked against primary resources. The second I could not find. Confidentiality appears in C1(f) and D2(b), and neither mentions technology; nothing in the proposed wording ties the two together. If you agree, Question 1 in the consultation is the place to say so.
Supervision: remember Mazur
At present the competences for supervising others sit inside a general section on working relationships. The SRA proposes a separate section on effective supervision (C4), aligned to its effective supervision guidance, and says that the Court of Appeal’s judgment in CILEX and others v Mazur and others [2026] EWCA Civ 369 has put a spotlight on supervision. Most practitioners will not need the case explained, but for the sake of completeness, the High Court had held that unauthorised staff conducting litigation under supervision were not allowed to do so under the Legal Services Act 2007. The Court of Appeal disagreed, holding that an authorised individual may delegate, remains the person carrying on the conduct of litigation, and must put appropriate supervision arrangements in place. It accepted that the earlier decision had had “real world impact”, as the Legal Services Board put it (paragraph 3), and observed that the Law Society’s original position highlighted how many solicitors had adopted a method of operation that meant they were potentially committing a criminal offence every time they allowed an unauthorised person to issue proceedings without their specific prior approval of the documents (paragraph 11). The SRA itself recognised the “concern and confusion among practitioners and firms” in its statement of 31 March 2026.
That is the comparison I would draw. Mazur showed how quickly a question about what supervision means can reach the working practice of a great many firms. This consultation settles the wording of what the SRA expects a supervisor to be able to do, and this time practitioners can be heard before the position is fixed. On substance, the Court of Appeal said that the degree of supervision depends on the circumstances and that the detail is a matter for the regulators (paragraph 187). The SRA’s proposed C4 reads as a list of good practice, including “being clear on the direction, supervision and control of tasks”. However, none of its 10 limbs says that supervision should be calibrated to risk, complexity or the experience of the person supervised, which is where the SRA’s own guidance puts the weight. Whether C4 is specific enough to help a supervisor judge how much is enough is a fair point that solicitors may wish to raise under Question 4 of the consultation.
Ethics: prioritising, but by what rule?
The SRA says it recognises the need for a greater focus on ethics and professional conduct in light of recent concerns about the ethical behaviour of some solicitors and firms; the paper gives no detail of, or evidence about, those concerns. It proposes new competences on being able to prioritise ethical duties when they come into conflict (A1(d)), and on understanding when and how to raise concerns about ethical issues or unethical behaviour (A1(f)). It also proposes widening the competence on good business practice beyond the SRA’s own rules, to take in the rules of other regulators that may bind a solicitor. This is likely intended, in part, due to the forthcoming move to the FCA for AML regulation.
Eight days before the consultation opened, on 30 September 2026, Monisha Shah, Chair of the Legal Services Board (the body that oversees the legal regulators in England and Wales), closed the International Conference of Legal Regulators in London (the text of her closing remarks, which the LSB published on 5 October, is marked to be checked against delivery). Monisha said she had been struck by the statement that the legal profession may have tried to “outsource its soul to regulators”. The speech does not say who made the statement originally. She went on to say that she would be thinking harder about whether the profession has replaced ethics with not acting illegally, and about the responsibility for preventing unhelpful dependencies arising within the system.
In my view, a neighbouring point sits in the consultation itself. The SRA is explicit that the Statement and its binding Standards and Regulations, including the codes of conduct, are complementary, and that it must take care not to introduce into the Statement a new obligation that belongs in the Standards and Regulations. The Statement describes the activities a competent solicitor must be able to undertake; the rules say what a solicitor must do. The Principles already contain a rule of priority: where they conflict, those that safeguard the wider public interest take precedence over an individual client’s interests. Whether A1(d) is meant to be that rule, or something wider, such as how a solicitor weighs confidentiality against disclosure, the wording does not say, and a competence to prioritise without a stated basis for priority risks being read differently in different firms. Any concerns or comments should be raised under Question 2 of the consultation.
Wellbeing
The new competences on health and wellbeing are welcome, and they raise a practical question. D4(b) requires “taking steps to create and promote an inclusive and healthy workplace culture”, yet the competences are pitched at what a solicitor can do on qualification, and in my experience culture is largely set by the people who run a firm. C4(j) requires supervisors to recognise and respond to wellbeing concerns in those they supervise and to provide support where appropriate. The paper does not say how either would be evidenced, or where the supervisor’s responsibility ends and the firm’s begins. People who supervise, and people who are supervised, are well placed to say whether the wording is workable by answering Question 5 in the consultation.
Threshold Standard
The Threshold Standard is a quieter issue. The SRA does not propose to change it, and the reason the paper gives is, in substance, that the SRA has had no feedback saying that it needs to change, together with an expectation that the level required of a newly qualified solicitor will not change significantly over time. I would not want silence to be read as agreement. Whether adding competences on checking AI outputs and on supervision alters what is expected of a newly qualified solicitor on day one is a question the paper does not address. Question 8 is where to raise it.
Where is the evidence?
One point runs across the whole consultation. The SRA points to feedback, recently published guidance and the Legal Services Board’s statement of policy on upholding professional ethical duties, which draws on research the LSB has published elsewhere. I could not find, in the paper or in the SRA’s rationale for each change (Annex 2), any data showing what has gone wrong in ethics, supervision or the use of AI, or any measure by which the SRA would judge, after September 2027, whether the new wording has worked. Question 16 of the consultation invites evidence on the SRA’s impact assessment. I encourage all solicitors to contribute, because the people who see the problems at first hand are the ones best placed to comment.
The Functioning Legal Knowledge
This consultation on the Statement of Solicitor Competence covers a second document too, the Functioning Legal Knowledge (FLK), which sets out the core legal principles and rules that every SQE candidate must understand and apply.
The SRA does not propose any fundamental changes to the practice areas covered by the FLK. It proposes removing the scope of anti-avoidance provisions for income tax, capital gains tax, corporation tax and inheritance tax, and making additions in Property Law and Practice, in Wills, Probate and Administration of Estates, and in Criminal Liability and Criminal Law and Practice. It has heard suggestions to add social welfare law and family law, and does not propose to. The paper also records stakeholder views that the FLK should be updated on alternative dispute resolution and mediation, following changes to the Civil Procedure Rules, and proposes nothing. Anyone practising in those areas, or in any area where they think the line is drawn in the wrong place, can now use this consultation to say so. Question 12 allows a response area by area.
What will happen next
After the consultation closes, the SRA will publish its response and the final versions of the Statement and the FLK in April 2027. Any changes would take effect in September 2027, ahead of SQE1 assessments in January 2028. Wording settled next year is likely to be the wording solicitors work under, and are assessed against, for some years, and I would rather the SRA heard from the people who will work under it before then.
The proposed Statement, with changes marked, is Annex 1 to the consultation. The online questionnaire has 16 questions. Reading Annex 1 against your own working week, and telling the SRA where it does not match, is the most useful thing a practitioner can do before 3 December.
Michaela Hardwick, Managing Director and Solicitor
