Does Legal Assistant Work Count as QWE?

Yes, legal assistant work can count as QWE, and it commonly does. Your job title has no bearing on it. The SRA looks at what the work involved, not what it was called, so the question is not whether you were a legal assistant, a paralegal, a case handler or an administrator. It is whether you were providing legal services.

Where the line falls

Legal assistant is a title used for very different jobs. In some firms it means running files with supervision. In others it means supporting a fee earner with typing, filing, diary management and billing. The first is QWE. The second, on its own, is not.

What you are looking for in your own role is occasions where you did legal work: taking instructions, gathering and assessing the facts of a matter, researching a point, drafting something that had legal effect, progressing a case through its steps, corresponding with the other side, preparing an application or a bundle with judgement rather than to dictation.

The administration point, which people get wrong in both directions

Candidates often strip every administrative task out of their record, assuming it weakens the file. That goes too far. Administration that is the tail end of a legal task is part of the legal task. If you analysed a limitation question and then diarised the deadline, the diarising is not a separate non-legal activity; it is the last step of the legal one.

What does not count is administration that exists on its own: opening post, managing a calendar, processing invoices, typing what someone else dictated. The test is whether the task required you to apply law or judgement, or whether it only required you to carry out an instruction accurately.

Most legal assistant roles are mixed, and the proportion is the answer

Very few legal assistant roles are wholly legal, and that is not a problem. QWE is measured as a proportion of your working time applied to the length of the placement. A role that is sixty per cent legal work over two calendar years produces about fourteen months of qualifying experience, not twenty-four.

Getting that figure right matters more than inflating it. Our guide on how much of your role counts explains the method and gives you a way to test your own estimate before anyone else does.

Who confirms it

If there is a solicitor at the firm who is willing to confirm your experience, use them. It costs you nothing and it is the simplest route. They do not need to hold a practising certificate.

Where that is not available, because the firm has a policy against it, because you have left, or because the solicitors who supervised you have moved on, an independent solicitor who did not employ you can confirm it instead, provided they have reviewed your work and received feedback from whoever supervised it. That is what we do. We have a separate guide on what to do if your employer will not sign off your QWE.

Competences a legal assistant role usually evidences

Typically obtaining relevant facts, legal research, planning and progressing cases and transactions, communicating clearly, keeping accurate records, and managing your own work. Drafting often features, and so does establishing professional relations with clients where you dealt with them directly. You need at least two, so a role that looks modest on paper frequently clears the bar comfortably.

If you have already left the job

That does not prevent confirmation. There is no time limit on how far back QWE can be claimed, and past roles count. What matters is whether the work can still be established and whether someone who oversaw it can speak to what you did. Both are worth checking before you assume the experience is lost.