Law society’s PD days for lawyers are just window dressing
The headline on a notice recently circulated by the Law Society of upper Canada (LSuC) announced, “Two-year review of CPd Requirement confirms success, introduces enhancements.” As someone who had been skeptical about the value of mandatory CPd (Continuing Professional development) from its inception, I was curious to see exactly how successful it had been, so I downloaded the Joint Report to Convocation from the Paralegal Standing Committee and the Professional development & Competence Committee, dated May 30, 2013.
What I found was that the committees had pronounced the program to have been “successfully implemented” because lawyers and paralegals were “overwhelmingly adapting” to i t. Since the failure to meet your CPd requirement means that your licence to earn income will be summarily suspended, it’s not too surprising that more than 99% of practitioners chose to comply rather than cut their financial throats.
But this hardly seems like an appropriate measure of success. The purpose of forcing lawyers and paralegals to engage in at least 12 hours of CPd annually is to enhance their substantive knowledge of the law and their grasp of professional ethics. Both are among the LSuC’s quality-control responsibilities, by law. If mandatory CPd were accomplishing these goals, I would expect the success to be reflected in two measurable results. First, complaints to the Law Society about professional misconduct should be declining. The report makes no mention of this at all. Second, negligence claims against law-
There is no evidence that mandatory ‘professional development’ serves any purpose
yers and paralegals should be declining. Again, the report does not provide any such evidence.
Meanwhile, the cover headline on the May, 2013 issue of LawPRO magazine (published by the company that insures Ontario lawyers) screams, “2012 Annual Review — Claims up again.” Before CPd became mandatory, there was a contingent of lawyers who voluntarily met or exceeded the annual 12 hours of learning, motivated either by competitiveness, pride in workmanship, sheer love of learning, or fear of negligence claims. But another contingent of lawyers must not have been voluntarily logging their 12 hours — otherwise, there would have been no need to compel them.
The latter group apparently wasn’t motivated by the same carrots and sticks as the former, or at least not to the same degree. As the saying goes, “you can lead a horse to water….” Merely exposing people to 12 hours of webinars doesn’t mean that they will learn anything, especially if they’re not motivated by the incentives that impel their more scholarly or more cautious colleagues. There’s no way of knowing whether they logged in to the webinar, muted their computer, and then ignored it for the remainder of their day.
One obvious solution would be to administer a test at the end of every course to see whether people absorbed the material. If someone failed, those CPd hours wouldn’t count. But imagine the outcry if convocation seriously proposed such a plan. Lawyers would be outraged at being treated like irresponsible children.
But if the LSuC is not prepared to measure results either by testing or by examining relevant statistics, then mandatory CPd is actually mere window-dressing. The LSuC should at least have the decency not to congratulate itself on some unproven “success.”