Six chartered legal executives can appear in the higher courts
Against 18,153 barristers with full rights of audience, the CILEX register holds six people with higher rights — the earliest granted in April 2025, four of them this year. The regulator is creating categories faster than the profession fills them.
Of the 7,727 practitioners on the CILEX register, six hold any form of Higher Rights Advocate authorisation. Six.
The earliest was granted on 30 April 2025. One followed in 2025, three on two days in January 2026, and one in May. Five are at private firms, spread across five towns from Plymouth to Stockton-on-Tees; the sixth lists no employer. This site does not identify them: six people is a group small enough that naming their firms would name them, and nothing here is published about an individual.
For contrast: the Bar Standards Board’s register holds 18,307 practising barristers, and 18,153 of them have full rights of audience. The capacity to appear in the higher courts, which is the thing “higher rights” grants, exists in one profession at a ratio of roughly 3,000 to one against the other.
The rights outnumber the people
This is one instance of something the register does throughout. It carries 30 distinct practice-right names. Seventeen of them first appear in 2024 or later — three in 2024, seven in 2025 and seven so far in 2026. Twelve of the thirty have fewer than ten holders, and every one of those twelve is a name created since July 2024. Between them the twelve account for 36 people.
| Right first appears | Number of rights |
|---|---|
| 1974 | 1 |
| 2003–2008 | 3 |
| 2015–2018 | 7 |
| 2023 | 2 |
| 2024 | 3 |
| 2025 | 7 |
| 2026 (to September) | 7 |
The base qualification dates from 1974 and 7,498 people hold it. The architecture around it — litigator, advocate, higher-rights advocate, each in civil, criminal and family flavours, some restricted to the judge’s room — is largely a construction of the last three years, and most of it is still almost empty.
A reading and a caution
The charitable reading is that the regulator is building the scaffolding first and the profession will climb it: six higher-rights advocates in seventeen months is a start, not a ceiling. The less charitable one is that a rights framework with more categories than practitioners in some of them is a framework designed for a profession that does not yet exist, and the register will keep saying so for years.
The caution is arithmetical. Twenty people on the register hold the same right listed twice, so any count of holders per right that reads the rows rather than the people is high by up to twenty — civil litigators are 947 by person and 955 by row. It is a small thing, but a register that can list a right against someone twice is a register whose totals should be recounted before anyone quotes them.
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