NSW Lawyers and CPD

Migration agents who hold a practicing certificate as a lawyer will usually only be required to complete 6 core points of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) each year.

Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) requirements for lawyers

Changes to the rules introduced on 1 April 2009 require that NSW lawyers undertake at least 1 MCLE unit each year in each of the following fields:

• Ethics and professional responsibility;
• Practice management and business skills; and
• Professional skills

Set out below are more details based on information supplied by the NSW Law Society.

Practical legal ethics core area

• Conflicts of interest
• How to identify an ethical issue
• Communicating direct with third parties
• Lawyer’s duties to the court
• Ethics within a technical legal context
• Topics which satisfy the mandatory requirement of Regulation 176 Legal Profession Regulation 2005

Practice management and business skills core area

• Risk management
• File management
• Cost rules
• Business planning
• Financing a practice
• Effective use of technology
• Topics which satisfy the mandatory requirement of Regulation 176 Legal Profession Regulation 2005

Professional skills core area

• Communication and interpersonal skills
• Client interviewing
• Plain English drafting
• Negotiation and mediation skills
• Career and personal development
• Advocacy
• Legal research

Although it set out the above guide, the NSW Law Society does not vet courses nor does it decide for lawyers what is “relevant to a practitioner’s immediate or long term needs in relation to the practitioner’s professional development and to the practice of law”.

It is a matter for the individual practitioner to plan their MCLE, participate in relevant CPDs and to make specific records accordingly.

For example, they can:

complete 7 unlevelled CPDs (total 10.5 hours) that, in a general sense, also cover “Ethics and professional responsibility” (e.g., conflicts of interest), “Practice management and business skills” (e.g., risk management) and “Professional skills” (e.g., client interviewing),

“OR”

choose to do a one hour Regulation 176 course each year and 6 unlevelled CPDs (9 hours in total) that cover “Professional skills” (e.g., client interviewing) and one of the other two mandatory fields – any one (hour) unit in the topics specified in Regulation 176 can be counted towards “Ethics” or “Practice management and business skills”.

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