Advancing the cause of justice through Mandatory Public Legal Service

Violations of the rule of law are rampant. Mandatory CPD is costly and ineffective. Here's how to solve two problems at once: Require lawyers to build competencies through service to the public good.

Five minutes tuned to the news or scrolling on your social media app can give you the latest on all the violations of human rights and abrogations of the rule of law taking place worldwide. As I write this in January 2026, I’m thinking in particular about violent attacks on innocent citizens in one country and massacres of anti-authoritarian protestors in another; but no doubt you could pick up this article months or even years from now and there’ll be different contemporary examples.

What I also see while scrolling, however, are members of the legal profession fighting back against these violations. In Minneapolis, statements from state and local bar associations condemning the ICE raids and shootings, as well as private and public lawsuits seeking to bar ICE activities in Minnesota, are welcome. But I was especially heartened by the retired immigration lawyer who’s training Minnesotans to be “constitutional observers,” and by the lawyers who marched on an ICE detention centre demanding that detainees receive their rights to counsel and due process.

In Iran, 210 brave lawyers signed a petition condemning the regime’s “grave and manifest violations of the right to life, the right to peaceful assembly, and the governing principles restricting the use of lethal force,” as the nationwide protestor death toll rises into the thousands. Even more remarkably, The 1Kalameh Lawyers’ Network reportedly issued a direct warning to Iranian judges, prosecutors, and investigating magistrates that “any participation in processes that violate the right to a fair trial … constitutes a clear violation of your legal, professional, and ethical obligations.” Rest assured, the authorities have taken note of all these lawyers’ names.

Something that’s often said, whenever a disaster like a crash or explosion happens, is that while most people are running away from the danger, emergency workers are running towards it. Similarly, the lawyers in Minnesota and especially in Iran are putting their own safety at serious risk by running towards the rule of law disasters in their communities, just like the “airport lawyers” did in response to the ban on travel from Muslim countries in 2017 — and who also, it should be noted, later faced government reprisals.

Exactly one year ago today, I published an article here titled “The Rule of Law needs champions. It’s time for lawyers to stand up.” It’s fair to say I didn’t oversell the danger of what we were facing; but even I didn’t think we’d find ourselves where we are now.

We owe a debt to those lawyers who, over the past year, have felt professionally and personally obliged to respond in some way to these rule of law violations. We also need to openly condemn the substantial number of lawyers who are actively aiding and encouraging these violations — lawyers who’ve forgotten their oaths and obligations, or buried them, or never took them seriously in the first place.

But what occupies me most is the largest group of lawyers by far — those who are neither actively working to oppose, nor actively working to support, actions that violate the rule of law. Maybe these lawyers aren’t sure what they should do, or they don’t think it’s their job to get involved, or they fear the consequences of acting against state power.

And I don’t blame them, at all, for any hesitation or recalcitrance they might feel. Most of them have no experience or training in how to apply their legal capabilities in the public interest, especially in times of crisis. Most of them have received little leadership or direction from their profession about their obligations and opportunities in this regard.

We need to change that, not just for current members of the bar, but for the thousands of new lawyers who join them every year. If we want the legal profession to stand for anything important — if we hope to have a future role in society once AI has displaced us from selling legal tasks by the hour — then we need to instill public interest awareness and service as a core value of the legal profession, and to give lawyers both the means and the mandate to make that value real.

I think we can start to solve this lawyer problem by solving a completely different one.

In 46 of 50 US states, and in all 13 Canadian provinces and territories, lawyers are required, as a condition of their ongoing licensure, to participate in continuing legal education (CLE) or continuing professional development (CPD) activities. In all but one of those jurisdictions (about which more below), lawyers must complete a minimum number of hours of CLE/CPD programming or activity over the course of a one-, two-, or three-year period. A handful of jurisdictions require a few hours of programming in ethics or EDI, but no jurisdiction requires the CLE/CPD to be specifically aligned with the lawyer’s practice specialty.

Now, an open secret in the legal profession is that there’s hardly any persuasive evidence that MCLE and MCPD requirements have produced measurable improvements in lawyer competence or reductions in lawyer malpractice or discipline. I flagged this all the way back in 2013, and I was not the first person to do so. In just the last five years, I can point you to five different articles and reports that find little or no evidence tying MCLE/MCPD requirements to better lawyer outcomes (e.g., fewer malpractice claims, fewer ethics complaints).

I’ve long since concluded that the MCLE/MCPD requirement functions partly as a token assurance of responsible self-regulation for public consumption, and partly as a cash cow for both private-sector and bar-affiliated CLE providers. Market research estimates of US lawyer spending on CLE in 2024 ranged as high as $4.85 billion or even $5.26 billion, with forecasts of an $8 billion market by the end of this decade. That is a massive amount of spending for a regulatory requirement with hardly any evidence to support it.

It’s highly unlikely, however, that the profession will do away with these requirements. Not only would the PR hit be enormous (headline: “Lawyers no longer need to be competent!”), but the entities that profit from MCLE would lobby ferociously against it. On top of that, it’s also true that the requirement does some good, even if not to a measurable degree — lawyers do pick up useful knowledge and skills in CLE programs. And there is public-interest value in a professional mandate to continuously improve competence; but hours-based CLE mandates aren’t the right way to accomplish this. We’ve needed a better approach for a long time.

Alberta provides us with a useful road map here. Unique among North American jurisdictions that mandate ongoing CPD compliance, Alberta does not require a minimum number of CLE hours. Instead, lawyers must create and submit an annual CPD plan using an online CPD Tool, selecting at least two competencies from the Law Society of Alberta (LSA)’s Professional Development Profile and at least one learning activity to develop each competency selected. Each year, a random selection of lawyers is contacted by the LSA’s Education Department for a CPD plan review, to confirm minimum compliance and offer coaching where needed (which incentivizes lawyers to actually follow up on their CPD plan).

I think this is a much more effective and professional approach than the tired and toothless minimum-hours requirement. It treats lawyers like adults who can assess their own competence needs, while giving them useful guidelines and strict parameters with which they can map out their continuing competence journey. I think every state and province with minimum-hour CLE systems could usefully adopt Alberta’s system.

But today, given the dire challenges to the rule of law we discussed above, as well as the absence of guidance most lawyers receive from their professional leaders in responding to these challenges, I’d like to propose a more advanced and more radical approach: The legal profession should adapt its “Mandatory CPD” rule and make it a “Mandatory Public Legal Service” rule.

Here’s what I propose: Start with the Alberta model of continuing competence, which directs lawyers to assemble a plan for how they intend to improve their professional capability in the upcoming year. Adapt the existing features of that model — including the Professional Development Profile, the CPD Tool, and the random reviews — to your jurisdiction as relevant. This one change alone could improve the effectiveness of your CPD efforts while saving many lawyers thousands of dollars in CLE programming costs annually.

But don’t stop there. Institute a rule that fully half of all CPD activities must be devoted in some way to advancing the public good or defending the rule of law. The activity should still include CPD essentials such as learning or honing legal knowledge and practical skills. But the setting or context in which at least half of those activities take place must be connected in some meaningful, defensible way to the public interest or the rule of law. This way, you would be combining or integrating two essential facets of a lawyer’s professional duty: to maintain and improve their competence, and to advance the public interest and defend the rule of law.

Here are some examples of the kinds of activities that could meet this requirement, along with the professional competencies they could help foster or enhance:

• Working a shift in a limited-scope legal aid clinic (client interviewing, issue spotting, time-pressured research, document preparation)

• Joining a volunteer roster of community mediators (negotiation, interest-based bargaining, drafting settlement terms)

• Providing impact litigation support for a public-interest case (advanced legal research, drafting briefs, designing trial strategy)

• Reviewing regulatory consultation submissions for an NGO (statutory interpretation, policy analysis, persuasive writing, stakeholder analysis)

• Working a professional responsibility hotline (applied ethics reasoning, conflict identification, confidentiality assessment)

• Providing procurement and contracting support for a non-profit (drafting and negotiation, risk allocation, compliance spotting, contract management)

• Supporting human rights agencies in discrimination investigations (assessing evidence, analyzing regulations, advising on responses)

Of course, we’re now forced to add activities like “advising illegally detained immigrants of their rights” and “filing applications to gain them their freedom” to that list.

Note that there’s no reason these activities have to be voluntary. If your legal day job already involves helping marginalized people obtain legal remedies or supporting community justice organizations in some capacity — and if that work involves the deployment and refinement of specific legal competencies — then you should be entitled to include those activities in your “Public Legal Service Plan.”

Nor is this suggestion intended in any way to detract from lawyers’ existing pro bono activities, already widespread in the legal profession and extremely commendable as both a professional and a public service. Pro bono activities almost certainly would qualify for the kind of Public Legal Service requirements envisioned in this proposal.

This change would not detract in any way from current requirements that lawyers maintain and improve their professional competence. Indeed, considering that each of the examples listed above could easily occupy 10 hours a year by themselves, this requirement could actually boost the amount of real-world time lawyers devote to professional knowledge and skill advancement. And they’d be serving the public interest in the process.

Finally, adapting your state or province’s MCLE/MCPD program in this fashion would not be as difficult as you might think. Alberta has already done much of the heavy lifting for you, with its Professional Development Profile adaptable into a guidebook for your jurisdiction’s lawyers to identify competencies worth improving. And virtually every legal regulator can identify local public legal needs and pro bono opportunities to which lawyers could offer their services (although organizations like the ABA, Pro Bono Canada, and Paladin are extraordinary resources for public-interest opportunities). All the parts are already there; they just need to be adapted and connected.

This is a first draft of a serious proposal that I’d like both rule-of-law advocates and professional regulators to think hard about. There are holes to be filled and improvements to be made in this outline, but I’m already well past my word limit. That’s partly why I’m putting this out here, to crowdsource a response — but it’s also because we can’t wait any longer to start mobilizing the legal profession and applying its vast legal capacity to protect and advance the rule of law.

The responses of individual lawyers to our current crises have been praiseworthy and gratifying. But we need to move past individual heroics; we need to activate this entire profession. We need to systematically imbue every lawyer, both those here today and those coming tomorrow, with an awareness of the threats against the rule of law, a recognition of lawyers’ professional obligation to defend the public good, and the structured guidance and courageous leadership that can turn lawyers’ skills into everyday justice. So let’s get started.