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Message: <blockquote data-quote="average_jo123" data-source="post: 215470" data-attributes="member: 15838"><h3>Other SQE2 stations</h3>Not sure I have that much to say about the other SQE2 stations tbh, but I will say a few words for each station below. If you have any questions about any one station in particular, please post them in this thread below. <h4>CMA / Writing</h4>I felt CMA and legal writing were practically just heavy tests of FLK. If you know your FLK well and analyse it according to the fact pattern, you will be fine. The only skill element that you would need to sharpen as you prep is just time management, knowing how to simplify legalese and answering the client's question directly and clearly. <h4>Advocacy </h4>Standard advice which I will repeat here is just practise practise practise. That's the only way you will get better at advocacy. You just need to do mocks under timed conditions and train yourself how to navigate through and engage with your bundle again and again until it comes naturally to you. One thing I wish I had done better though is improving my note-taking skills. I felt that all the notes I took during my prep time were always a complete mess and I remember even in my real exam there were points where I had so much written down that during submissions when I was referring to my notes I would get lost in them and take 5 seconds (too long) just to find where I left off and which part of my notes I should continue from. I probably should have used my time running up to my exam to properly polish my note-taking skills but I guess I just never really properly got round to it and now I can only hope it didn't cost me too much. I never wrote out full scripts for my submissions (this is a bad idea btw, in case you are considering it - first of all you won't have time to write in prose instead of bullet points and secondly it is really bad if you are reading a script off a page during your submissions). I would usually outline my main points and write my big headings across all the pages I have and leave big gaps in between and fill them in later. I would then fill in each big heading with bullet points. Where I refer to the bundle, I would make a note of where it is so I can direct the judge to it. The issue I often faced was I would scribble it all out and when it came to reviewing my notes and running through my speech in my head before I actually make my submission, I would find that my bullet points under my main headings don't flow quite right and I want to re-shuffle the order in which I made my points. On top of that I would find that oh I actually want to link this point to that point instead, or oh I actually want to my next point back to this crucial fact etc etc. And I would draw all sorts of arrows reshuffling all this stuff + amending bundle references and found that when it came to my submissions, I forget the final order of points I actually decided on and accidentally mutter out stuff in the wrong order as laid out in my initial draft, and end up getting lost in my notes and backtracking on myself. In retrospect I feel maybe I had this issue maybe because I should have tried a different note-taking technique, or maybe I just needed to brush up my advocacy skills even more such that I can actually tell the story right on the first try instead of flip-flopping so much and end up getting confused myself. Or it might have to do with a time management issue as well i.e. maybe I should have spent less time doing up my initial draft notes and left more time to review and familiarise myself with how I have re-arranged my points so I don't get lost during submissions confused by my initial vs final draft. Whatever it cause of the issue is, I wish I had fixed this problem before I went into the exam. But maybe I am also being overly critical because I am analysing my own performance in retrospect - idk. But I'm just saying this so if you find that you struggle with the same problem as I described above, try to catch these bad habits and errors and ask for help from your tutors to fix it well before you sit your oral exam. <h4>Interviewing and attendance note</h4>Apart from the standard advice that practice makes perfect, one additional point I will note is just don't neglect practising attendance note. During my time on the SQE2 prep course ULaw structured workshops in such a way that you practise with your classmate the actual interview during the workshop and you're supposed to go home and attempt writing up an attendance note for it. I personally thought this was low key stupid cause by the time I left the classroom I would have forgotten what I said and what client said in the interview and it is not at all representative of what the real exam will be like - which is you write the attendance note immediately after you wrap up the interview. So when you do mocks with your friends, remember to practise writing out attendance notes. I did do a few attendance note practice rounds, but I will say they do get very dull after a while. Because once you get the hang of how fast you need to write, how to manage your time etc, you kind of just rinse and repeat and you do get some level of confidence that you will be able to repeat the same in the real exam. I personally felt that it wasn't necessary to do up an attendance note for every single practice interview I had, but definitely do at least 5-ish or however many it takes to give you enough confidence that you can replicate a decent one on your exam day. Practising attendance note is also important for learning time management. I had not considered this until I saw a post on Reddit of someone panicking saying they spent too much time during the actual exam writing about the facts they gathered from the client and barely wrote down any FLK-related advice they gave in the interview. This is definitely something you want to look out for. Whether you will have a lot of facts to write down will depend on how much info you manage to extract from your client, but you will need to be careful how much facts you are writing down if you do end up with a very cooperative client who actually feeds you a lot of factual information. I'm ngl I don't really know exactly how the attendance note is marked and whether they do perform a checkbox exercise of how many facts you manage to extract from client and if that contributes to your skills marks at all, but I remember personally to stay on the safe side I figured that because law is assessed on the attendance note and not in the interview itself, I thought it would be important to get all the key legal bits in rather than trying to show that I managed to gather loads and loads of facts from the client (who knows, maybe the actors are fed a load of facts which may not even be relevant to the advice that you should be giving anyway). I remember in the exam I laid out the main headings for my attendance note across the pages and filled in the gaps in between as a I went along. In the ULaw template there is a section at the start of the attendance note where you give a factual background for the client's situation, then only you go to your main advice and next steps. I remember I did fill in key background information but I left out bits and bobs that I knew would take me a long time to write out in prose in the attendance note, because I wanted to leave enough time to fill in the substantive advice section of my note. Basically I just didn't want to be caught in the situation where I spent all my time writing out the facts to fill out the factual background section and not have enough time to write about the actual advice and next steps I recommended to the client. So I remember when I practised writing my attendance notes and also in the actual exam I would jump to the rest of the attendance note and the detailed facts I gathered re each issue + advice + next steps, and only come back to the really minute details for the factual background if I had the time. I think in the real exam I fortunately did manage to write down everything I gathered from the client in the attendance note, but when I practised I just took this approach just in case in the real exam I am stuck with way too much factual information which would take me a long time to write in prose. I just focused on practising how to filter out non-key information as I went along and making mental notes on what to come back to only if I had enough time to cover all my other substantive advice first. Again, I have no clue whether my approach is correct + I have no clue if I even passed SQE2 — you will need to look at the marking rubric and make a judgment call yourself. <h4>Research</h4>Research was a complete shitshow for me every time I did a mock as well as in the actual exam lol. I completely expecting it to come back as 1s and I'm only hoping that I've done enough in the other stations to help me scrape a pass. I don't have much advice to give for this ngl cause I sucked so badly at it. Maybe someone else who was actually good at it can contribute here. I feel there is a serious lack of mocks which are actually similar to the stuff that came out in the real exam in terms of fact pattern as well as the research materials attached. I just did as many mocks as I could and crossed my fingers going in. ULaw mocks were relatively good tbf but inhousew research mocks were mid. People have given semi-helpful advice on legal research on the SQE2 subreddit I think, so might be worth searching there and see what people say. My main struggle with research was I just felt I could never read quickly enough and every time I did it everything I read just goes straight over my head and I just experience this whole mind fog it's actually awful. I just always felt that my brain can't think quickly enough to click all the right points together based on the stuff I was reading. So maybe if this is your strong suit, you would be much better at legal research. The only tip that made it slightly more manageable (which you would have heard from elsewhere) was just skimming everything first and cutting out the irrelevant documents. I think this is useful most of the time, but can also backfire in that if you are not careful when skimming you can end up accidentally cutting out a document that actually housed relevant information. This was why I hated legal research the most — the only strategy which I thought made the task somewhat manageable for me, was, at the same time, so difficult to actually execute correctly. I remember every time I tried to skim and cut out documents I would still constantly second guess myself and waste even more time going back and skimming a document a second or third time just to make sure it actually was irrelevant. The SRA mock was easy in the sense that it was quite easy to spot which documents were irrelevant and to cut them out immediately (question asked for criminal liability, not civil). But I think the tricky questions were written in such a way that it's not so easy to spot which documents were relevant and which weren't, and on top of that, the answer would be buried in the document somewhere and if you miss it your analysis would simply be inaccurate / incorrect.</blockquote>

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