The facts about Professional Development requirements.

by Caroline Nevin

By December 31, every practicing lawyer must complete at least 12 hours of Professional Development (PD) in accredited educational activities. No less than two of the 12 hours must pertain to any combination of professional responsibility and ethics, client care and relations, or practice management. If the annual requirement of 12 hours is not met by December 31, the Law Society will charge a late fee of $200. If the requirement is not met by April 1 of the following year, the Law Society will impose a suspension until all required PD is completed. Note: CBABC is providing extra courses to help you meet the requirement in time if you haven’t already.

Although the rules are made by the Law Society, CBA staff do get a lot of questions about the new requirements so I thought it might be helpful to outline some basic things that are important to know, as well as some exciting new changes that will allow mentoring to qualify as an approved PD activity as of January 1, 2010.

First, the key points:

1. The topic must be of significant intellectual or practical content with the primary objective of increasing the professional competence of lawyers, paralegals, articling students and/or law students; it must deal primarily with substantive, procedural, ethical, practice management (including client care and relations) or skills topics related to the practice of law; and it must be primarily designed and focused for an audience that includes primarily lawyers, paralegals, articling students and/or law students but not if the subject matter is targeted primarily at clients, the public, other professions or other students.
2. There must be more than one person involved, either in-person, online or on the telephone, so that there can be discussion and/or a Q&A session.
3. CBA Section meetings and CBA approved PD events count, as do other events by “approved” providers (visit lawsociety.bc.ca to see a list). You can also organize your own self-study group, Bar association PD or internal firm activity, either by registering with the Law Society or by partnering with the CBA (we have packaged modules, specifically designed to meet the 2-hour ethics requirement.
4. The Law Society created three very useful online courses with testing components that count: the Small Firm Practice Course, Practice Refresher Course and Communications Toolkit.
5. Teaching a law-related course counts three hours for every one hour taught. This includes for audiences other than lawyers, law students and paralegals if it is “a continuing professional education or licensing program for another profession, or a post-secondary educational program.” Note: CLEBC and Sections Chairs always welcome volunteer presenters.
6. Time spent writing law books or articles for publication counts as long as it is related to the study or practice of law (including articles in BarTalk!).
7. If you are ever in doubt about whether a PD activity will be approved, talk to the Law Society staff about it at 604-669-2533 or toll free 1-800-903-5300.

The Law Society will allow some kinds of mentoring activity to count for up to six hours of PD credits as of January 1, 2010. The CBABC Women Lawyers Forum has had a mentoring program for years – contact cba@bccba.org or visit online at cba.org/bc under Professional Development. And don’t forget that your CBA PD and Section meeting hours are automatically listed online at cba.org/bc/PD to make your Law Society reporting easy!

cnevin@bccba.org

This article was published in the December 2009 issue of BarTalk. © 2009 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.