The Regulations oblige solicitors to ensure that:

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

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 ”Management & Professional Development Skills‘ 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:

(i) financial and business management,
(ii) practice management,
(iii) self-management,
(iv) client care,
(v) regulatory matters,
(vi) Irish or English language enhancement as it relates to the practice of law,
(vii) foreign language enhancement as it relates to the practice of law, as may be more particularly defined and specified in the Scheme”

Examples include courses on improving your skills in financial and business management, practice management, client-related issues, self-management, professional ethics, mediation, human resource (HR) management, budget control, computer skills, language enhancement relevant to the practice of law, advocacy and client care, stress management, management of the working environment including addressing work-related anxiety and mental health concerns, compliance issues, regulatory matters, etc. This list is not exhaustive.

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.