SQE1 Prep — The Audio Course

A newspaper says the Supreme Court has struck down an Act of Parliament; your client's licence depends on whether that can be true.

A Court of Appeal ruling matches your client's case almost exactly, and the one fact that differs is why the judge can decide against him.

A minister and an Act of Parliament can impose exactly the same speed limit, and only one of them can be destroyed in court.

A trader puts a price ticket on something the law says she must not offer for sale, and whether she is guilty turns entirely on what the word offer already means.

A residents' association files inside the three months everyone told them they had, and can still lose the claim before anyone argues the law.

A minister spends three weeks attacking her own government's decision on television, a citizen goes to the High Court, and the court will do nothing at all.

A price tag in a shop window, cash counted out on the counter, and a shop owner who is still perfectly free to say no.

A supplier promises a loyal customer 20 per cent off for a year, then changes its mind, and English law sides with the supplier.

A nephew is named in an agreement, promised £5,000, and can recover nothing, because of a single line the sisters' solicitor put in.

A signature binds you to every word you never read, and one question asked at the counter can undo it.

The law writes terms into your contract that nobody agreed to, and then refuses to let you write them out again.

A crane sits idle for seven weeks, the builder writes ending the hire, and that letter turns out to be the more expensive mistake.

The dealer says one previous owner, the car has had four, and nothing about owners is in the written agreement, which is exactly why the claim works.

A rogue buys a car with a cheque that bounces and sells it on before anyone notices, and whether your client ever sees it again turns on a single word.

A gardener does half the job and walks away, and the law hands him nothing, while a decorator who hangs one strip of wallpaper crooked is paid almost in full.

A caterer walks away three weeks before the wedding, and the one number the couple can recover explains almost everything contract damages do.

A woman bites into a cereal bar she was given rather than bought, and the law lets her sue a manufacturer she has never dealt with.

A driver with thirty years and no accidents judged 35 miles an hour to be a safe speed for him, and the law had already stopped listening.

A hospital sends a dying man home without a doctor seeing him, admits it was careless, and still pays nothing.

Proving the defendant caused the harm is not the end of it, because the law still decides which harms count and what they are worth.

A bakery loses power for two days, suffers three separate losses, and will only ever be paid for two of them.

The ear defenders were in the cupboard the whole time, and nobody ever told her the noise could take her hearing.

A man goes up a scaffold with no edge rails because refusing the job would cost him the work, and whether he consented turns out to be the whole of this topic.

A neighbour lifts your garage door to fetch a ball, and in that second he stops being a visitor and becomes a trespasser under a different Act of Parliament.

A jar of skin cream you never bought, a sealed tub nobody could check, and a manufacturer you have never dealt with who is liable anyway.

Bands next door rehearse until midnight and the homeowner cannot sleep, but the tort she needs protects her house rather than her.

A caterer loses one booking and her house is on the line, because of a decision she made before her first customer.

A partnership can exist before anyone decides to have one, bind you to a deal you never heard of, and follow you for years after you leave.

A freelance developer wants to own, run and be the whole of her new company, and half the internet is telling her that is impossible.

The accountant says a company must have a board of at least two, and he is about to cost four friends their coffee shop over a rule that does not exist.

A bidder offers your client £10,000 to see its tender home, she reports it to the board at once, and the board wants to know whether it can simply say yes.

A shareholder with 55% of the company watches a resolution he opposes carried three votes to one, and one word from him reverses it.

A company with an overdraft at its limit, £1 shares nobody will pay £1 for, and an investor waiting with £50,000 the law will not let it take.

Two founders built a company together for eight years, and the one holding 40% has just been voted off the board entirely lawfully, which is exactly why the law will help.

A board has just won three big contracts and has cash in the bank, and it still cannot lawfully pay a penny of dividend.

A board hands its books to a firm of chartered accountants, signs what comes back without asking a question, and discovers the law was never looking at the accountants.

A company secretary inherits four handwritten registers in a filing cabinet, and only one of them is still required by law.

Two ways to raise the same £200,000, each costing £20,000 a year, and one of them is quietly cheaper than the other.

A deed that says fixed charge on every page can still leave the lender at the back of the queue.

A business owner leaves half her profit in the business to fund expansion, and whether she is taxed on money she never sees depends on a decision she made before she started.

Your client's balance sheet shows a comfortable surplus, an unpaid demand from a supplier is twenty-five days old, and the finance director insists a company with more assets than liabilities cannot possibly be insolvent.

Four months into his bankruptcy a letter arrives saying the enquiries are over, and he is certain that means he is free.

Your client wants privacy, a decision-maker who knows his industry, and a timetable of his own, and the courts can give him none of the three.

A warehouse frame has been failing since the day it was built, and the claim was already dead before anyone found out.

Your client is owed £150,000 and everyone assumes that figure sends the claim to the High Court, which is exactly the assumption that costs money.

A managing director opens the post on 20 May to find a claim form that was served on his company's solicitors on 1 May, and by then he has already run out of time.

A defence that denies everything and explains nothing can hand the claimant the very allegations the defendant most wanted to fight.

A blank box on a court form, an opponent shouting nullity, and a rule that quietly saves the whole application.

A £12,000 claim about a garden wall, and the solicitor asks for three experts, four years of emails and a three-day trial.

A witness repeats what a colleague told them, the other side objects, and the judge lets it in anyway.

Your client hands you the file and says the one email that would sink his defence stays out of it.

The witness who can win your case has just written to say he will not come, and the rule that makes him attend has a deadline hidden inside it.

An advocate cross-examines for a full hour without once mentioning the phone call, then asks the judge in closing to find that it was invented.

A winning solicitor serves a bill on which every single hour is reasonable, and the costs judge is about to cut it anyway.

A solicitor diarised the appeal deadline with care, filed early, and was still six days too late.

Your client has won £45,000 and wants the money within weeks, but the debtor has no job, no savings, and one mortgaged house.

A solicitor spots a £15,000 error in the other side's completion statement, says nothing, tells no lie, and is still in breach.

He will not say how he made his money, he wants to complete this week, and the maximum sentence if you act anyway is fourteen years.

Arranging a client's buildings insurance is ordinary conveyancing, and keeping the introduction fee quietly turns it into a criminal offence.

A solicitor puts an injured client on a no win, no fee deal, and two months later she finds her motor policy would have paid for everything.

Your client writes to say she is perfectly happy for you to act even though you own part of the company selling to her, and that written consent is worth nothing at all.

A trained lifeguard walks past a drowning man she could have saved in seconds, tells nobody, and commits no offence at all.

A shove meant only to push someone away can carry five years, and it makes no difference that you never once thought about hurting him.

The pellet never broke his skin, and that single fact decides whether the charge of unlawful wounding survives at all.

A man locks his business partner in a walk-in freezer on Friday evening, says he only wanted to teach him a lesson, and admits he knew nobody would open it until Monday.

One punch outside a takeaway, one fall onto a kerb, one death, and the whole of homicide law turns on what was in the defendant's head.

Your client's van is towed to a compound, he climbs the fence that night and drives his own vehicle out, and he is charged with stealing it.

A thief who shoves the owner three days later is not a robber, and a burglar stuck fast in a window still entered the building.

A genuine burglary, a real television and one inflated figure on the claim form, and the full offence of fraud was complete the moment she posted it.

Everyone who saw the incinerator beside the fence knew it would go up, except the man who put it there.

She jabs her keys into the face of the man running at her across a dark car park, and he was only returning the purse she had dropped.

Two friends agree on a fists-only beating, and one of them pulls out a gun the other has never seen.

A custody officer tells your client he cannot see a solicitor until after the first interview and will have to pay for one, and both of those statements are wrong.

An officer walks a man out of an alley, holds him by the arm and asks the witness whether that is the one, and in doing so probably destroys the case.

He has a credible self-defence account and a named witness, and he is the worst possible person to put through a police interview.

The prosecutor asks the bench to refuse your client bail because releasing him would damage public confidence, and there is no such ground anywhere in the Act.

A client who would sail through the means test can still be refused legal aid, because the test that decides it has nothing to do with money.

One word said on the right morning is worth four months, and the warning that makes the choice an informed one is the one everybody forgets.

A solicitor waiting for the prosecution's disclosure receives a single-page letter saying there is nothing to disclose, and that letter is not a failure but the start of the clock.

A judge told a jury that once the killing was proved it was for the defendant to show it was an accident, and the House of Lords quashed the conviction.

A woman sees the robber's face for three or four seconds, and an hour later his pocket answers the question her eyes could not.

A dying woman names her killer to the first officer at the scene, and the exception everyone reaches for was abolished years ago.

The confession is accurate, the science proves it, and the judge is still going to keep it from the jury.

His counsel said nothing against the complainant at trial, and the jury heard his record anyway.

An officer walked into your client's flat without a warrant, and what your client wants next is two different things with two different answers.

Your client has been reading about criminal trials and is certain the defence speaks first and the Crown has the final word, and he has it backwards on both counts.

A judge finds that the offending does not cross the custody threshold, and then passes a suspended prison sentence to give the community order some teeth.

Your client says she has nothing to lose by appealing her sentence, and she is wrong in two different ways.

Two brothers take a bicycle from a neighbour's garden and both admit it on camera, and only one of them can be prosecuted.

The mirror is bolted to the wall with four bolts and she is still entitled to take it with her, which is the first thing land law teaches you.

Your client completed on Friday, has the keys and is asleep in the house, and on Monday morning she still does not own it.

A wife who paid half the price and never left the house can lose her share entirely, and whether she does turns on how many people signed the receipt.

A solicitor forgets to send off one form, and a buyer who has exchanged contracts and paid her deposit loses the cottage to a stranger who knew nothing about her.

A man leaves everything he owns to his sister, dies, and she writes to his co-owner demanding half the house, and she is entitled to none of it.

Two sisters inherit their mother's house, one wants it sold and one does not, and the law no longer takes the seller's side.

A workshop changes hands, the transfer says nothing at all about the drive leading to it, and the buyer has a right of way anyway.

A house and a cottage share one roof, the roof leaks, and the law says nobody can be made to mend it.

A bank lends £200,000 and takes a deed, a finance company lends £50,000 two months later, and the finance company is paid first.

The agreement calls it a licence and says she has no exclusive possession, and she has a lease anyway.

A company that walked away from its lease a decade ago has just been billed for someone else's repairs, and one date on one document decides whether it has to pay.

Your landlord client has a forfeiture clause, a tenant plainly in breach, a notice already served and proceedings already issued, and he has still got it wrong.

Four weeks after exchange a fire guts the cottage, nobody had insured it, and the buyer still has to pay the full price.

A trainee reads two of the three registers, reports that the title is clear, and misses the covenant that destroys the reason her client is buying.

The local authority search came back completely clear, and it still tells her nothing at all about the field she is buying the house for.

Your client asks you not to mention to the bank that his deposit is really a loan, and you act for the bank as well.

A buyer who has not yet got the keys can watch the house burn down and still have to pay the full price for what is left of it.

Your client has the keys, has moved in, and finds the seller's name still on the register three weeks later.

A seller serves a notice to complete on his late buyer, then gets an offer £15,000 higher from the neighbour, and discovers that his own notice has trapped him.

A document headed licence on every page, describing him as a licensee, saying it creates no tenancy, and it is a lease.

A tenant grants what he calls an underlease, goes on thinking of himself as the landlord, and has in fact assigned his lease and left.

A tenant loses patience with a slow landlord, completes the assignment anyway, and discovers it has given away the lease but kept the liability.

Everything is agreed, the landlord's costs are paid, and completing before the licence arrives would cost the tenant a release it can never get back.

He assigned the lease before the millennium, and the demand for £42,000 has just landed on his mat.

A cracked window frame worth a hundred and fifty pounds cost a company its entire escape from a lease, and the rule that did it is the strictest in property practice.

The solicitor used the prescribed form, served it before the term date, and still destroyed his client's request for a new lease.

The furniture works is now an indoor climbing centre, not a brick has been touched, and it still needed planning permission.

Completing on the new house before the old one sells adds £25,000 to the tax bill, and every pound of it can come back.

A gift made in full confidence creates no trust at all, until you read the sentence that follows it.

A father sends off the share transfer forms, the company takes six weeks to register them, and the dividend that lands in the meantime is not his.

Every beneficiary wants the trust wound up, the youngest is sixteen and her mother has agreed on her behalf, and it still cannot be done.

A woman funding free sports coaching in the area she grew up in is told her trust cannot be a charity because she has not registered it. She has been told wrong.

Six years of paying someone else's mortgage can buy you nothing at all under a resulting trust, while signing the loan on day one buys you a share outright.

Five years of bills, shopping, cooking and cleaning, and when the relationship ends she owns nothing at all.

An auctioneer pays £180,000 of trust money into the trustee's personal account, knowing the deed forbids it, and says he never thought of it as dishonest.

A trustee acted honestly, took an opportunity nobody else could have taken, and equity still made him hand over every penny.

Six friends are named as trustees of a farm, all six are willing and able, and only four of them are trustees at all.

A trustee sells a field at full value, reinvests every penny properly, leaves the fund no worse off, and is still in breach of trust.

There is £40,000 sitting in the trustee's account, the trust put in £20,000, and the beneficiary can trace neither figure.

One of the two witnesses never got round to signing, and the man he wanted to provide for takes nothing.

A woman loses her legacy because of who her husband was standing next to on the day the will was signed, and she never touched the document herself.

He drew a line through his sister's legacy and wrote revoked in the margin, and she is still going to be paid every penny of it.

She left her sister my estate car, then sold it and bought a hatchback, and the sister ends up with neither.

An executor talks a bank into releasing the account on a copy of the will, pays it all out, and two months later an unpaid invoice arrives with his name on it.

The painting was worth £25,000 when his mother died and £34,000 now, and the executor would very much like to take it at the old figure.

A son who survived his mother by five years after a large gift expects taper relief to save him a fortune, and it saves him nothing at all.

A man leaves £50,000 out of a £700,000 estate to the wife he was married to for twenty-five years, and the law measures her by a kinder standard than anyone else who might complain.

A bank offers a new firm one account with every deposit tagged as client or firm money, and taking it would be a serious breach.

A cheque goes into the wrong account, the wages go out, and the firm discovers it owes far more than the difference.

The client account is comfortably in credit, the court fee is due today, and you still cannot pay it.

The bank pays the firm £9,000 of interest on the client account, the clients are owed £6,400, and the firm keeps the difference lawfully.

There is no twenty-four hour rule, and believing in one is how a small overdraft turns into a career problem.

Your client has paid you six thousand pounds and it is all still in the client account, and you still cannot send the completion money.

Two clients, one pot of money, and a trainee who is certain you need two bank accounts to keep it straight.

The report was finished in September, well inside the deadline, and posting it a fortnight late is still a breach in its own right.