Major Changes Coming to Canadian Lawyer Licensing

Transformative change is underway in the Canadian lawyer licensing system. Two of the country’s largest law societies have signalled the impending end of high-stakes, multiple-choice legal-knowledge exams as the primary test of lawyer licensure.

In Ontario, a September report from the Law Society of Ontario (LSO)’s Professional Development and Competence Committee proposed that the current multiple-choice barrister and solicitor exams be replaced with a “mandatory skills-based course with assessments for all licensing candidates.”

The committee identified a lengthy list of problems and challenges associated with the written exam system, including:

• Written exams fail to assess core practice skills like interviewing, writing, oral advocacy, and negotiation, to such an extent that candidates regard the exam as misaligned with real lawyer work.
• Time-pressured, open-book multiple-choice questions drive candidates to assemble and consult complex indices of knowledge, rather than demonstrate understanding or applied analysis of legal issues.
• Candidates, especially those who are internationally trained and Indigenous and those who need accommodations, report significant mental-health strain from the exam format.
• Social-media sharing and mobile device risks prompted a security audit to assess the risk of cheating, but meaningful fixes would require curtailing the open-book model and undertaking a major reconstruction of the process.
• The exams constitute a growing cost and operational burden for the law society, given the resource-intensive nature of exam development and delivery as well as increasing and complex accommodation requests.

These findings are not new. The committee’s critiques reflect those of studies in other jurisdictions, primarily in the US, that have found written legal knowledge exams are insufficiently valid and defensible as a new-lawyer competence assessment method.

“Licensing assessment should focus on the most important competencies relevant to entry-level practice today,” the committee wrote. “The current licensing examination model has been in place for almost 20 years. During that time, the practice of law has evolved, and reforms have been made to the experiential training requirement.”

Accordingly, the committee proposed the establishment and adoption of a mandatory skills-based course with assessments for all licensing candidates. “The course would be delivered through the use of self-directed modules, workshops and virtual law firms. Accompanied by robust feedback, licensing candidates would be able to learn and demonstrate their understanding of the material. The course would be offered online to ensure accessibility to applicants across the province, but in a manner designed to facilitate interaction.”

Importantly, the committee stated that “a final assessment … would evaluate the candidates, to ensure that they meet the entry-level competence standard required to practise law in Ontario. These assessments may include scenarios to determine whether each candidate has the knowledge and skills required to practise. Trained lawyer assessors would determine individual outcomes based on accepted testing standards.”

The report cited two Canadian examples of a “skills-based course with assessments”:

1. The Practice Readiness Education Program (PREP), the skills-based bar admission program employed in Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan for the last several years; and
2. The Law Practice Program (LPP), a pathway to licensure in Ontario that offers a skills-building and assessment program as well as a four-month legal work placement that replaces the articling requirement.

While passage of the LPP did away with an Ontario candidate’s need to article, an LPP candidate still has to write Ontario’s barrister and solicitor exams. However, PREP does not teach legal knowledge and does not include any written legal knowledge exams as part of its assessment.

The LSO report did not recommend that Ontario adopt either of these programs as the vehicle for a new skills-based program for all Ontario candidates. At this stage, the committee is informing the profession of its assessment and proposal and inviting input on whether and how the law society should incorporate training and assessment into its bar admissions process.

Should the law society accept the committee’s proposal and go on to adopt a skills-based licensing program, the significance would be difficult to overstate. The LSO has been administering written bar examinations since 1959; Ontario alone admits nearly half of all new lawyers in Canada every year. This proposed shift would constitute a sea change in new lawyer licensing in Canada.

But if Ontario did go down this path, it would not go alone. The Law Society of British Columbia announced in October that it would retire its longstanding bar admissions program, the Professional Legal Training Course, in 2026 and adopt PREP as its new lawyer licensing program thereafter. Whereas the PLTC required passage of two written exams and four skill assessments, PREP requires a two-week Capstone Evaluation at the end of the program without any written legal knowledge exams.

Full disclosure: I am not a neutral observer when it comes to new lawyer licensing in British Columbia. In 2022, I submitted a lengthy report to the LSBC that recommended the adoption of a competence-based system for lawyer licensing. That report, accepted by the law society in December 2022, was one antecedent of the eventual establishment by the four western law societies of the Western Canada Competence Profile (WCCP) in 2024.

As part of my report (pp. 58-63), I endorsed the discontinuation of the PLTC, which in its time had been a pioneering bar admission program but had since been surpassed by skills- and competence-focused approaches. I suggested that the law society either develop and implement its own skills-based bar admissions program, or join one of the pre-existing programs, PREP or the LPP.

When British Columbia joins PREP next year, half of all Canadian provinces will be using this system; should Ontario also adopt a skills-based program, then only in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland & Labrador would written legal knowledge exams constitute the bulk of new lawyer licensure activity. (In Québec, aspiring legal professionals are required by both the Barreau du Québec and the Chambre des Notaires to complete both knowledge-based assessments and practical skills-based programs.)

I strongly support the proposal of the LSO’s Professional Development and Competence Committee to adopt a mandatory online skills-based program with assessment for all licensing candidates. This would align Ontario with the growing trend in Canada away from re-testing the legal knowledge of licensure candidates and towards an actual assessment of the fitness of a candidate to receive a law license.

Not only that, but shifting to a skills-building and competence-assessment licensing system would further position Canada as a world leader in this area. An innovative new licensure pathway in Oregon (and potentially one in the state of Washington) specifically references Canada’s pioneering role in this area.

Finally, this approach would strengthen public confidence that Canada’s legal regulators are truly evaluating the capacity of aspiring lawyers to serve their clients and run their practices competently, ethically, and professionally. There’s never been more pressure on lawyers to demonstrate their value, reliability, and proficiency in an increasingly automated and commoditized legal sector. Competence-building and assessment in licensure is the best way forward for the legal profession.