The Regulations oblige solicitors to ensure that:

(i) the CONTENT (i.e. topics, etc.) of the minimum requirements (summarised above) must be comprised of Professional Development & Solicitor Wellbeing,

and

(ii) that this minimum CPD requirement must be undertaken in one of the three permitted FORMATS/ways, namely, in either Group Study format and/or by eLearning and/or by writing relevant material that is published.

The expression ”Professional Development & Solicitor Wellbeing‘ is broad and diverse, and is flexible in the CPD guidelines. It is defined as including “education or training (or both) in any one or more of, or a combination of, the following areas:

• Financial and business management
• Practice management
• Self-management
• Solicitor wellbeing
• Language enhancement, i.e. Irish, English, or foreign language enhancement as it relates to the practice of law – as may be more particularly defined and specified in the Scheme”.

You should be able to justify the relevance of any course you attend to your practice, and the “overriding test is that the education / training must be relevant to the practice of the solicitor at the time it is undertaken or in the future”. Partners’ meetings per se may NOT be counted for CPD record purposes, nor are private study and / or research.

An excess of hours in the Client Care & Professional Standards category may be claimed towards the Professional Development & Solicitor Wellbeing category.