The CILEX route

There are 11,603 people on the CILEx Regulation register, of whom 7,498 are chartered legal executives. Its register is the place to check an individual. The rest of this page is about how people get on to it, and about how much smaller the published evidence base is than for the other two large professions.

What CILEX members are authorised to do

Authorisation is granted by activity rather than as a single licence, so two chartered legal executives can be authorised for quite different work. That is unlike the solicitors’ roll, and it is the main thing to understand before comparing the two titles.

The stages, in order

1. Get a job doing legal work

   This route starts with employment rather than ending in it. A paralegal or legal assistant post in a firm, a local authority, an in-house team or a legal aid practice is the usual starting point, and the work you do in it is the qualifying material.

   Paralegal work and this route are often the same job, described two different ways, with and without a qualification attached.

2. Study alongside the job

   CILEX sets the qualification and its structure, content and fees have changed in recent years. Its own pages are the ones that bind and we do not restate them here: a careers site quoting a superseded syllabus is worse than a careers site that sends you to the publisher.

3. Apply for authorisation, by one of three routes

   CILEx Regulation authorises chartered legal executives through a qualifying experience assessment, through Fellowship by work-based learning, or through Fellowship by the Chartered Legal Executive apprenticeship. There is a separate CILEX Practitioner authorisation.

   In 2024 it received 526 qualifying experience assessment applications that were paid for processing, against 584 in 2023; 596 applications for authorisation as a chartered legal executive by work-based learning, against 659; and 74 through the apprenticeship, against 75. Thirty-four new CILEX Practitioner applications were received and seventeen were authorised.

4. The decision

   CILEx Regulation’s office took 1,122 decisions in 2024, approving 1,120 and refusing two. By route: qualifying experience 462 of them, 41%; Fellowship by work-based learning 586, 52%; and the apprenticeship 74, 7%. A further twenty-five applications went to the Admissions and Licensing Committee, which approved twenty, deferred one and refused four.

   Those are decision counts in a calendar year, not a count of people qualifying and not a student population. No new training providers were approved in 2024, and six advocacy skills courses ran, all with a 100% pass rate — on course sizes small enough that the percentage is not telling you much.

5. Then, if you want it, the solicitors’ roll

   CILEX is a recognised route to admission as a solicitor. In the twelve months to August 2026 the SRA admitted 166 solicitors through CILEX or as justices’ clerks, out of 9,384 admissions in total. It is a real door and a narrow one.

The honest comparison of scale

1,120 authorisation approvals in 2024, against 9,384 solicitors admitted in the twelve months to August 2026. Those are different publishers measuring different things over different periods, so do not read the ratio too precisely. The order of magnitude is the point: for every chartered legal executive authorised, something like eight solicitors are admitted.

What that buys you is a profession where the route is cheaper, the employer usually pays, and the competition at the entry gate is nothing like the competition for a training contract or a pupillage. What it costs you is recognition: a lot of employers, and a lot of clients, still do not know what the title means.

What nobody publishes about this route

• How many people are studying for it. CILEX, the membership body, and CILEx Regulation publish separately, and we could not locate a current student-population figure from either. The solicitor and Bar routes both have published enrolment series. This one does not.
• What chartered legal executives are paid. There is no official earnings figure for the title. The nearest published measure is the Office for National Statistics’s legal associate professionals occupation, at a median of £32,438 in April 2025 on 41,000 employee jobs — a wider group than chartered legal executives, and employees only.
• Pass rates by training provider. Not published, by anyone, for this route.

Where CILEX members work

The register names each member’s employer, which makes this the best-documented profession in the sector for the question an applicant actually asks: who would hire me, and where. The employers are overwhelmingly outside London, and they are not the firms the commercial careers press writes about.

Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.