The Legal Executive

Reporting on CILEX and the legal executive profession

Compared with the solicitors

Every number on this site is about one profession, and nearly every question about it is comparative. Is 7,727 a lot? Are six higher-rights advocates few? The SRA publishes monthly counts of the profession next door, so both questions have an answer.

23×
more practising solicitors than authorised CILEX practitioners
7,126
solicitors with higher rights of audience, against 0 chartered legal executives
166
of 9,384 new solicitors qualified through the CILEX route

Size

Practising professionals in England and Wales. Solicitors as at Aug-26; CILEX as at the date on the methodology page.
  1. Practising solicitors 179,054
  2. Solicitors on the roll 214,773
  3. CILEX authorised practitioners 7,727
  4. CILEX registered paralegals 3,876

There are about 23 practising solicitors for every authorised CILEX practitioner. Add the 3,876 people on the Professional Paralegal Register and the CILEX registers hold 11,603 — still under 6% of the solicitors' profession.

Firms

Regulated byFirms
The SRA8,923
CILEx Regulation 22

This is the starkest of the comparisons and the least remarked on. A chartered legal executive can own and run a law firm, and 22 do. The overwhelming majority of the 7,727 work inside somebody else's firm — usually an SRA-regulated one. The profession is, structurally, employed.

The higher courts

7,126 solicitors hold higher rights of audience. The corresponding CILEX qualification is held by 0 people — not 0%, 0 people. On the SRA's own breakdown, 3,034 (43%) of their number are civil-only and 2,797 (39%) criminal-only.

These are different qualifications awarded by different regulators and the comparison is one of scale, not of equivalence.

Where new solicitors come from

In the year to August 2026, 9,384 people were admitted as solicitors. 166 of them came through the chartered legal executive route — the path this register's people are already on. It is one of the smallest routes in, and it is also the only one that requires already being a qualified lawyer.

The institution

What CILEX is, as a matter of company law.

BodyCompanyAccounts
Cilex Regulation Limited
The regulator. Independent of CILEX for regulatory purposes; the register on this site is its register.
 06712409 FULL, last made up 31/12/2025
Cilex Law School Limited
The teaching arm, incorporated in 1983 as ILEX Tutorial College and renamed since. The route most people on the register qualified through.
 01734484 SMALL, last made up 31/12/2024
Chartered Institute Of Legal Executives
The professional body itself. It holds a Royal Charter, which is why it has no company number.
 Not a registered company —

Solicitor figures are the SRA's own published counts of the community it regulates (regulated population statistics), collected 2026-09-27. Company details are from the Companies House free company data product, Crown copyright under the Open Government Licence. What is not here is a firm-level join: the SRA's firm data sits behind a registered account and an API key, so "which of our 3,097 employers are SRA-regulated" is a question this site cannot currently answer. Methodology.