The new BAC door
The nature, scope and content of many Bar Admissions Courses across Canada are undergoing substantial upheaval. These innovative new approaches to training tomorrow’s lawyers could mark the leading edge of change in the profession itself.
By Patti Ryan
Up until several years ago, Bar Admission Courses in a number of provinces were rather archaic. Relics of an earlier era when both law schools and the legal profession were very different, some BACs used strict classroom-based models that more closely resembled traditional private schools than modern learning environments.
“It’s not reasonable to expect law schools to simply devote themselves to being farm systems for the legal profession.”
George Hunter, Borden Ladner Gervais, Ottawa |
More recently, that has begun to change. BAC administrators have recognized that the old assumptions don’t apply anymore and that new skills and new learning methodologies are needed. Contemporary BACs are as likely to teach accounting skills and hold ADR seminars as they are to feature a veteran lawyer lecturing students who dutifully scribble notes.
But even those changes were just a prelude to what appears to be a fundamental process of rethinking Bar Admission Courses in a number of jurisdictions.
There’s a growing conviction among law societies that students don’t need to review what they’ve already learned in law school so much as they need the practical skills of their profession — drafting, interviewing, negotiating, cross-examining, managing risk, behaving ethically, and conducting themselves professionally, to name just a few.
In several regions across the country, BAC administrators have been asking themselves probing questions about both the gaps and the bridges that exist between law schools’ and law societies’ mandates. Law societies are debating new ideas about what is and isn’t important for new lawyers to know, and asking questions that might not have been asked before:
Is the BAC working? Are we producing lawyers who are equipped to practise law competently and successfully? If not, what needs to change? The answers might fundamentally alter the future state of the legal profession.
Rethinking assumptions
The whole idea of even having a BAC first came about decades ago, says George Hunter, a partner with Borden Ladner Gervais in Ottawa and former chair of the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Task Force on the Continuum of Legal Education, which is overseeing changes to Ontario’s program.
Interestingly, says Hunter, the BAC grew out of a basic mistrust between law societies and law schools. "The law societies felt the schools weren’t teaching certain subjects and skills that were necessary," he explains. "Therefore, [the law societies decided] they would have to do it themselves."
When the LSUC struck a Bar Admissions task force some years ago, one of the first observations its members made was that this mistrust was a thing of the past. "The law society acknowledges now that the law schools exist to teach people about law more generally in an academic setting," says Hunter. "It’s not reasonable to expect that law schools would simply devote themselves [to be] farm systems for the legal profession."
But there were more practical drivers of change. In Ontario, BAC reform had become an issue partly because students were skipping the Bar Admissions classes — in some courses, the attendance rate was as low as 30 percent. But the students were acing the exams anyway — they would simply take the material home and study it.
It didn’t take course administrators long to identify the problem. Much of the BAC’s substantive-law offerings were simply redundant, since those subjects were being covered sufficiently in law school. That observation alone would bring about a significant change in the Ontario BAC.
The LSUC task force also considered new demographic data that strongly suggested BAC students were learning in an entirely new way. "The average age of a student taking the BAC now is 31," Hunter points out. "We’re dealing with people who are more mature in terms of background, formal education and life experience.
"Most of them are technologically very erudite," he adds. "You can sit on the end of the dock and sip your cappuccino [and read the materials] as well as you can in a lecture hall. … [Students] are used to getting their information from technology. They’re not interested, frankly, in going to lectures from old warhorses like me."
Based on these conclusions, the LSUC task force’s first recommendation was to do away with live lectures on substantive law. The second was to beef up the preliminary skills component — effectively doubling the time devoted to it — and make attendance mandatory.
A third, significant recommendation concerned examinations. Currently, students write exams immediately following each one- or two-week course on a given subject. That’s going to change.
"At the end or at any time during the articling period, students can write what will be two required examinations," says Hunter. "One will be on a barrister’s module and the other on a solicitor’s module. Passage of both will be a prerequisite to successfully completing the process."
Playing the game
BAC absenteeism is rampant in Quebec as well, but with slightly different consequences. Of the 800 to 1,000 new graduates enrolling in the BAC each year, just two-thirds pass every exam on the first try, while the remaining 30 to 35 percent need to retake at least one or two of them, says François Fontaine, a partner at Ogilvy Renault in Montreal and president of the Quebec Bar School’s Comité de la Formation Professionelle.
But that relatively high failure rate is not the reason Quebec is changing its BAC, says Fontaine. A new, redesigned BAC is really needed to address the widely varying levels of knowledge with which students enter the course, and to better emphasize the practical skills of lawyering that students apparently are not taking seriously enough.
"We must try to identify those students who enter the course already willing to play the game, so to speak — to learn and apply the practical skills — as compared to those who still need more review before they can get to that point," says Fontaine.
"The students who are ready to play the game feel that a review of substantive law is a waste of their time," he notes. "That is a valid concern that needs to be addressed."
The new course will be much more skills-oriented, she reports. Students who feel they first need a refresher on substantive law will need to arrange extra help on the side. The existing BAC, which is currently an eight-month program, will be shortened considerably to a three-month session instead.
As in Ontario, the new Quebec BAC will make participation in the skills-training sessions compulsory. "If students don’t complete these exercises correctly and seriously, or if they fail to attend or do the exercises at all, they will not be eligible to write the exam," says Fontaine. Quebec hopes to launch its new BAC in September of 2005, a year before Ontario introduces its new program.
Coast to coast
Not every province is radically overhauling its Bar Admission Course, however. While the Law Society of British Columbia considered making changes to its Professional Legal Training Course (PLTC), it soon decided change wasn’t necessary, because the current system was working well already.
"Creating a new course is a huge undertaking — it’s expensive and time-consuming," says LPTC Deputy Director Lynn Burns of Vancouver. "We had extensively reviewed our course in 2001 and 2002, and found no problems with it."
British Columbia did make some minor changes to its articling program, though, and these are coming into effect now. Articling principals must now have seven years of experience instead of just four, while both principals and students must agree at the outset on a checklist of what they will accomplish, then file both an interim and a final report.
The first change, notes Alan Treleaven, Director of Education and Practice at the Law Society of B.C., came about simply because it was thought that more experienced lawyers could provide more experienced guidance. Similarly, the checklist system — already used in other provinces — is aimed at encouraging a more enriched articling experience for the students, instead of leaving it to the luck of the draw and hoping students drew some value from their articles.
At the other end of the country, Newfoundland is also happy with its existing BAC. The program does undergo incremental changes from time to time, based on feedback from students. Recently, for example, the skills training component has been given greater emphasis in an effort to achieve a better balance between substantive law and practical skills.
Like Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland has no law school, so its articling students studied law in other provinces. That means the Newfoundland BAC must still touch on some substantive law, in order to make students more familiar with the laws of their own province.
Students in Newfoundland take the BAC halfway through articles. The course takes them away from their firms for two months, nine to five Monday to Friday. The course is broken down into six substantive areas, plus the skills training component. Each section concludes with a 3 1/2-hour exam; the skills component is taught through workshops.
But here too, the emphasis is placed on constantly aiming to improve the service. Student feedback has been a key element in maintaining the BAC’s effectiveness, says Francis O’Brien, Director of Legal Education with the Law Society of Newfoundland in St. John’s. And the feedback is overwhelmingly positive.
"We do some extensive surveying of our students after each component of the course, and we do an extensive exit survey when they leave the course," says O’Brien. "We get tremendous positive feedback. Students say it makes them a lot more comfortable with becoming members of the profession."
A new direction
Perhaps the most intriguing development in the evolution of the Bar Admission Course, however, is taking place in the three Prairie provinces, whose law societies are banding together to plot an entirely new course for training novice lawyers.
A new, regional BAC for Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan is coming into effect this summer, applying to students currently in their third year of law school. Joan Copp, Deputy Director of the Canadian Centre for Professional Legal Education in Edmonton, which is overseeing the new joint BAC, explains the rationale for the change.
"Four years ago at a meeting of the Federation of Law Societies, the directors were talking about mobility, about how lawyers moved around from province to province without necessarily doing transfer exams," says Copp. "The issue came up: How are we licensing lawyers to begin with?"
After the provinces exchanged information, she says, they discovered they were teaching and testing essentially the same material, but delivering the programs and tests differently. "We realized there were things we could tweak to harmonize, so we started asking the question: how could we share resources?"
So representatives from the four western provinces (British Columbia was participating at this point, though it later dropped out) worked on identifying the skills they thought newly qualified lawyers should have, and then established a common foundation and built a competency framework, including performance criteria.
They also asked each other: If you could build the best bar course, what would it look like? What would you do differently? Copp says they eventually looked to the CA School of Business, which runs qualifying courses for students becoming chartered accountants. "There’s an online component and a face-to-face component, and we were intrigued by what they had done.
"The idea is to place the student in a virtual accounting firm, where they’re required to produce work and are marked accordingly," says Copp. "We thought that concept would work well for a law firm."
The actual BAC programs will vary slightly among the three provinces, but the material being taught and the method of delivery will be similar. "We’re moving away from the concept of bums in seats, making the course more practice-oriented," says Copp.
"Students will sit in on interviews and be responsible for the law. There will be less direct teaching but much more participation. Rather than just memorizing and regurgitating at exam time, students will be required to think, analyze, research and problem-solve.
"I think it will make the course more interesting and challenging," says Copp. "It will get students to a higher level of critical thought. It will train the students to think like lawyers."
Will their new regional BAC be a precursor to a national program someday? Copp says that’s "not outside the realm of possibility," but is not something they’re working on right now. With new rules on lawyer mobility making it easier to practise in more than one province, however, the Prairie BAC might just be the wave of the future.
Patti Ryan is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Her last story for National, about law firm intellectual Patti property, appeared in our March/April 2004 issue.
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Réno-Barreau
De l’Atlantique au Pacifique, les cours d’admission au barreau sont en constante évolution. Virage à 180º pour certains, simples améliorations pour d’autres, le National vous offre un portrait de la situation.
À travers le pays, les cours d’admission au barreau connaissent de profondes transformations. De nouvelles méthodes d’enseignement sont mises à l’essai et les programmes de cours deviennent plus centrés sur les habiletés pratiques. Pourtant, cette tendance commune à chacune des provinces s’incarne de différentes façons.
Repenser les prémisses
L’idée d’un cours d’admission au barreau serait née, il y a plusieurs années, de la méfiance entretenue par les ordres professionnels envers les facultés de droit. « Les barreaux étaient d’avis que les facultés n’enseignaient pas certaines matières et habiletés qui étaient nécessaires », explique George Hunter, un associé chez Borden Ladner Gervais à Ottawa et ancien président d’un groupe de travail du Barreau du Haut-Canada chargé de revoir le programme ontarien.
« Ainsi, [les ordres professionnels de juristes] se sont dit qu’ils allaient s’en charger. »
Cet arrangement n’aurait plus sa raison d’être en Ontario. C’est la conclusion à laquelle est venue le groupe de travail auquel appartenait Hunter lorsqu’il a constaté que malgré un taux d’absentéisme frôlant les 70%, le taux d’échec des étudiants n’avait pas augmenté. C’est donc dire que la matière enseignée dans les facultés de droit était suffisante et que le contenu du cours d’admission au barreau s’avérait redondant.
Qui plus est, le profil de la population estudiantine avait changé. « La moyenne d’âge des étudiants est de 31 ans », souligne Hunter. Ils sont plus matures, disposent d’un bagage d’expérience générale plus lourd et savent utiliser la technologie à leur avantage.
De simples constats, le groupe de travail est passé à l’étape des gestes à entreprendre afin de renouveler le cours d’admission au Barreau du Haut-Canada. Les exposés magistraux seront éliminés, le temps alloué à l’apprentissage d’habiletés de base doublé, et la présence obligatoire. En ce qui concerne l’évaluation, seulement deux examens seront requis et ils se dérouleront durant le stage.
Miser sur les habiletés pratiques
À l’instar de l’Ontario, l’absentéisme est aussi un problème criant au Québec mais entraîne des conséquences différentes. Sur les 800 à 1000 diplômés s’inscrivant à l’École du Barreau à chaque année, seulement les deux tiers réussissent chacun des examens au premier essai.
Pour François Fontaine, associé chez Ogilvy Renault et président du Comité de formation professionnelle de l’École du Barreau du Québec, un nouveau programme serait nécessaire afin de s’adapter aux différences entre les candidats. « Nous devons tenter de différencier les étudiants qui sont déjà prêts à jouer le jeu, si vous me permettez l’image, c’est-à-dire, à apprendre et à mettre en œuvre les habiletés pratiques, de ceux qui se doivent de revoir les principes de droit avant d’atteindre cette étape », explique Fontaine.
Le nouveau programme qui passera d’une durée de huit à trois mois insistera davantage sur les habiletés pratiques et les étudiants qui ressentent le besoin d’une mise à jour académique devront se charger de l’obtenir par la bande. La présence aux cours sera par contre obligatoire. « Si les étudiants n’accomplissent pas les exercices sérieusement et correctement ou s’ils ne se présentent pas en classe, ils ne pourront rédiger les examens », précise Fontaine. Le Québec espère lancer son nouveau programme en septembre 2005, un an avant l’entrée en vigueur du nouveau programme ontarien.
Sources d’inspiration
Ce n’est pas toutes les provinces qui ressentent le besoin de changer en profondeur leur cours d’admission au barreau. La Colombie-Britannique, après avoir considéré cette possibilité, a choisi de continuer avec une formule qui fonctionnait déjà bien. Seuls des changements mineurs seront apportés dont le nombre d’années d’expérience du maître de stage qui passera de quatre à sept ans et l’ajout d’une liste de vérification, d’un rapport d’étape et d’un rapport final à compléter durant le stage.
Même décision du côté de Terre-Neuve qui, puisqu’elle ne bénéficie pas de faculté de droit sur son territoire, se doit tout de même d’enseigner certaines notions de droit substantif à ses futurs juristes qui ont du s’expatrier dans une autre province pour étudier. La tendance va vers l’amélioration mais non vers la réforme complète.
Ce sont les Prairies qui nous apportent les changements les plus importants et qui sait, tracent peut-être la voie de l’avenir. Les barreaux du Manitoba, de la Saskatchewan et d’Alberta ont choisi de joindre leurs forces afin de créer un programme pour toute la région.
S’interrogeant sur le meilleur contenu à offrir, ils ont choisi de s’inspirer de la formation des comptables agrées. « Il s’agit de faire évoluer l’étudiant dans un cabinet comptable virtuel ou il se doit d’accomplir certaines tâches et est noté en conséquence », explique Joan Copp, directrice adjointe du Canadian Center for Professionl Legal Education d’Edmonton. « Nous pensions que ce concept s’adapterait bien à un contexte de cabinet juridique. »
Certaines petites différences persisteront entre les provinces mais la matière enseignée et la méthode utilisée, axée sur la pratique, demeureront les mêmes. « Je crois que ça rendra le cours plus intéressant et motivant », conclu Copp. |
