What FLK1 covers
FLK1 is the first of the two SQE1 assessments and leans towards business and contentious practice. From the January 2027 sitting it carries 170 questions across two sessions of 85, and the subjects are split between those sessions:
| Session | Subjects |
|---|---|
| Session 1 | Business Law and Practice · Dispute Resolution · Legal Services |
| Session 2 | Contract Law · Tort · Legal System of England and Wales |
Ethics and professional conduct sit across the whole paper: a conduct point can be the hinge of a question about a shareholders’ agreement or a witness statement. Money laundering and the SRA’s financial crime obligations appear in FLK1 rather than FLK2.
Business Law and Practice
The largest and most practical subject in the paper. It runs from choosing a business vehicle to winding one up: partnership and LLP basics, incorporation, the constitution of a company, shares and shareholders’ rights, directors’ duties and the decision-making machinery of board and general meetings, financing by equity and debt, security over assets, and insolvency.
Tax comes with it, in the shape a solicitor meets it: corporation tax on company profits, income tax and national insurance for partners and employees, capital gains on a disposal, and VAT at a working level.
The subject has a guide of its own: Business Law and Practice for SQE1.
What the questions look like:a scenario with directors, shareholders and a proposed transaction, ending in “what must the company do first?” or “which resolution is required?” Thresholds and procedure — ordinary versus special resolution, notice periods, filing deadlines — are examined relentlessly because they are what a newly qualified solicitor is expected to know without looking up.
Dispute Resolution
Civil procedure, from the pre-action stage to enforcement: which court and which track, limitation, statements of case, applications and interim remedies, disclosure and evidence, witness and expert evidence, trial, costs and funding, appeals, and the alternatives — negotiation, mediation and arbitration.
Walked through step by step in Dispute Resolution for SQE1.
Where candidates lose marks: deadlines and the consequences of missing them, the difference between what a party may apply for and what the court will order, and costs consequences of Part 36 offers. This is a subject where knowing the rule roughly is worth almost nothing.
Contract Law
Formation, certainty and consideration, terms and their incorporation, implied terms, exclusion clauses and the statutory controls on them, misrepresentation, mistake, duress and undue influence, frustration, breach and the remedies that follow — damages, the limits on recovery, and specific performance.
Covered on its own in Contract Law for SQE1.
What the questions look like: a short commercial story with one thing going wrong, and five answers that each describe a plausible legal consequence. Success usually turns on identifying what kind of term has been broken, and what loss the law will actually compensate.
Tort
Negligence as the core — duty, breach, causation, remoteness, defences — plus psychiatric harm and pure economic loss, employers’ and occupiers’ liability, vicarious liability, product liability, nuisance and Rylands v Fletcher, and the main defences and remedies.
Covered on its own in Tort for SQE1.
Where candidates lose marks: causation. Questions frequently put an obviously careless defendant in front of you and test whether the carelessness caused the loss complained of, or whether the harm was of a kind the duty protects against.
The Legal System
How law is made and applied: the courts and their hierarchy, precedent and statutory interpretation, the role of judges, the constitutional fundamentals including parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and the separation of powers, judicial review, human rights in domestic law, and the residual place of retained EU law.
It is the smallest slice of the paper by question count and the one most often ignored until the last week. It is also the cheapest to secure: the rules are finite and they do not change from question to question.
Legal Services and ethics
The regulatory architecture — the SRA Principles and Codes of Conduct, reserved legal activities, client care and complaints, conflicts of interest and confidentiality, and the anti-money-laundering regime with its customer due diligence and reporting duties.
It has a guide of its own: Legal Services and ethics for SQE1.
Treat this as two subjects that behave differently. Legal Services questions are asked directly in Session 1. Ethics is asked everywhere: buried in a company question about a director who is also a client, or a litigation question where the other side’s solicitor has sent privileged material by mistake. Because it is pervasive, ethics is the highest-yield revision in the paper.
Where the marks go
Two patterns show up in almost every candidate’s analytics:
- Procedure beats principle. Marks are lost on thresholds, deadlines and sequence — which resolution, which court, which deadline — far more often than on the big doctrinal questions.
- The second-best answer is the trap.Most wrong answers in FLK1 are legally accurate statements that do not answer the question asked. If your review reads “that was true too”, the problem is technique, not knowledge — reading an SBA question properly is a separate skill worth practising deliberately.
The practical way to find your own pattern is to answer enough questions for one to emerge, with a breakdown by subject and subtopic behind it. FLK2 is mapped the same way in the FLK2 subject guide.