Cognitive Load Theory 

Cognitive load theory suggests that people have a limited amount of cognitive resources, or mental processing power, which affects how much information they can take in and remember at one time.

Working memory can store around 4 individual elements at a time. However, imagine you are learning a completely new legal concept—let’s say the rule against perpetuities in Trusts Law.

You might start learning about lives in being, 21 years, vesting of interests, and perpetual trusts. If you’re new to the topic, holding all these concepts simultaneously will create significant cognitive load.

To optimise learning and reduce cognitive load, several strategies can be applied:

• Pre-train with foundational concepts
  Before approaching complex doctrines, it helps to build up the necessary background knowledge. For instance, tackling perpetuities is far more manageable if you’re already comfortable with concepts like future interests and the basic mechanics of trust law. Without this groundwork, advanced topics will feel unnecessarily difficult.
• Use multimodal learning
  Since visual and auditory information are processed through different channels in working memory, combining them enhances learning. Watching a video on Civil Procedure while sketching out a timeline of the litigation process, for example, makes use of both channels and can improve comprehension and recall.
• Avoid split attention
  Learning is disrupted when related information is unnecessarily separated. When studying a flowchart of litigation stages, for example, the explanation of each step should appear directly on the diagram, rather than in a separate text box or glossary, so the learner isn’t forced to mentally integrate disconnected sources of information.

Chunking: Making Information Stick

One of the most effective ways to manage the sheer volume of information in SQE1 is through chunking—the process of grouping related pieces of information together so they can be stored as a single “unit” in your memory.

Since working memory can typically only hold around 5–9 separate items at a time, chunking allows you to reduce cognitive load by organising multiple elements into one meaningful whole.

Think of how we remember the colours of the rainbow: listing out seven individual colours is demanding, but remembering the phrase “Roy G Biv” instantly triggers recall of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

The mnemonic becomes a chunk—a single prompt that cues up a full set of details.

Chunking information about company structures and governance can also help in retaining complex legal concepts.

Mnemonics

Mnemonics are a powerful way of putting chunking into practice, especially when learning dense or list-based material. They help compress long or abstract information into something short, structured, and easy to remember.

Whether you’re memorising a legal list, a multi-factor test, or a procedural step, mnemonics serve as efficient mental handles. For instance, to recall the grounds for judicial review—illegality, irrationality, procedural impropriety, and human rights proportionality—a strange phrase like “Incredibly Irrational Purple Hippo” may help trigger the right words during recall. The weirder, more personal or more vivid, the better.

Acronyms serve a similar function. One SQE1 candidate recalled using “PAIR” to memorise the duties of a trustee: Protect assets, Act impartially, Invest prudently, and exercise Reasonable skill and care. This compressed a complex list into a single, easy-to-remember term.

Importantly, creating your own mnemonics is more effective than memorising someone else’s. The act of generating the phrase forces you to engage with the material actively, and the final result is more personally meaningful, making it easier to retain. You might develop mnemonics or acronyms to help with:

• Elements of offences in Criminal Law
• Multi-factor tests in Contract or Tort
• Procedural steps in Property Practice
• Requirements for legal defences
• Ethical principles in Professional Conduct

Used well, chunking and mnemonics can significantly reduce mental effort, allowing you to store more information without overwhelming your working memory—exactly the kind of edge you want going into SQE1.

As a challenge, try creating your own mnemonic for the elements of negligence (duty, breach, causation, and damage) or the requirements for a valid contract (offer, acceptance, consideration, and intention to create legal relations).

What strange or memorable phrase could help you remember them instantly under pressure?

Elaborative Encoding and Memory Palaces

Elaborative encoding is a kind of compression, but it actually works by adding more information, not less. The aim is to align new information with images and places that you know well, to minimise the cognitive energy required to memorise it.

The most effective and well-known of elaborative encoding techniques is to associate abstract information with a familiar physical space. This is what is sometimes known as the ‘Mind Palace’ technique.

To create your own mind palace, you need to imagine a building you are very familiar with – many people choose their childhood home – and ‘place’ bits of information in particular rooms of the building.

For example, if you wanted to recall the priority order of creditors in insolvency law for SQE1, you could imagine entering your home and seeing different creditors in different rooms:

• Fixed charge holders sitting comfortably in the living room (first priority)
• Expenses of liquidation being calculated at the kitchen table (second priority)
• Preferential creditors waiting in the hallway (third priority)
• Floating charge holders floating around upstairs (fourth priority)
• Unsecured creditors crowded in the garage (fifth priority)
• Shareholders standing outside in the garden (last priority)

This is most effective when combined with visualisation, making the images memorable and connected to the legal concepts.