Speaking to a US-based regulatory conference last month, I remarked on a key difference between the Canadian and American lawyer licensing systems: “In Canada, we decided that nobody should be allowed to practise law until they’ve spent a period of time performing supervised lawyer work in a legal services environment.”

This mostly refers to the “articling year,” a decades-old tradition in Canada that mirrors similar customs in most other countries that require a person to complete a term of supervised practice or apprenticeship before they are granted admission to the profession. (Canada has a few other supervised practice options, which we’ll talk about a little later.)

In the United States, one of the very few countries that don’t have a similar requirement, interest in supervised practice as a replacement for the bar exam spiked during the pandemic and led several states, including California, Florida, and Illinois, to temporarily grant bar admission to aspiring lawyers if they completed hundreds of hours of practice under the supervision of an experienced practitioner.

A few Americans would like to see supervised practice become a permanent alternative to the bar exam, and I’ve often heard US lawyer friends comment admiringly on our articling requirement. But the reality of articling is less admirable than it might appear from a distance. In theory, it makes sense for an experienced practitioner to oversee an aspiring lawyer’s learn-the-ropes performance of lawyer tasks, providing valuable experience and feedback to the trainee while ensuring the client is competently served. In practice, that’s not often how it works.

A supervised practice requirement for bar admission is terrific only if it’s done properly, fairly, and systematically. As I’ll describe below, articling in Canada is riddled with problems on all these counts. So I want not only to encourage countries that haven’t adopted supervised practice requirements (🇺🇸) to do so, but also to challenge Canada (and other countries) that do mandate this step to be more conscientious and vigorous about making sure it actually works.

In some ways, articling is to Canada what the bar exam is to the United States — the traditional final stage in the licensing process, so rooted in the professional culture that its rampant flaws are ignored or excused on the grounds that “we’ve always done it this way” and “if I had to go through it, so does everyone else.” If we want to maintain our status as a self-governing profession that purports to apply robust, verifiable competence standards for admission to its ranks, then we need to do better than that.

Whether we’re Canadians talking about improving on articling or proposing superior methods of supervised practice — or whether we’re Americans looking to create a supervised-practice requirement of our own for bar admission — we need to establish a threshold standard for supervised practice, one that would satisfy skeptical outside observers that newly licensed lawyers demonstrably possess the entry-level knowledge, skills, and attributes of law practice.

I recommend that regulators and bar admission overseers create such a standard and integrate the following four elements into their lawyer licensing processes. And because people seem to like acronyms, I’ve arranged these elements to make my CASE that supervised practice standards should be:

Consistent: To ensure fairness, the supervised practice experience should be as similar for all licensure candidates as can be practically achieved. There is unacceptably wide variance in apprenticeships today: One articling student might benefit from a highly positive work environment with mentoring and support, while another might wind up in a barely functional law office, purely through the luck of the draw (or non-relevant hiring factors). This variance is a direct consequence of outsourcing a key element of the regulatory role to the private sector; either much tighter controls and parameters must be placed and enforced on law firm apprenticeships, or the whole process must be centralized under direct regulatory oversight. Which leads to:

Accessible: A supervised practice system that is unavailable to some licensure candidates is unfair; a system in which the inability to obtain a supervised practice opportunity is directly correlated to one’s race, ethnicity, or country of origin is unfit for the profession. There must be systematic assurance that everyone who wishes to become a lawyer can meet the mandated requirement of supervised practice. Moreover, affordability must be considered. Today in Canada, some supervised practice options pay much better than others, while others are unpaid altogether. This wide variance in the financial cost of apprenticeship is another barrier to entry into the profession.

Safe: We can’t continue to send young people into workplaces where they will be subjected to harassment, discrimination, or abuse, and simply accept it as “part of the experience.” It’s especially egregious that we tolerate this treatment of novice lawyers with no power or leverage, unfamiliar with legal culture and dependent upon their supervisors’ approval to complete their training and start their careers. If regulators are going to require vulnerable bar applicants to enter into legal workplaces, they must regulate and closely monitor those workplaces to guarantee they are safe, secure, fair, and free from exploitation. It’s no excuse to say ensuring that kind of system would be “too expensive.” If we can’t afford to provide safe apprenticeships, then the requirement should be abandoned altogether.

Effective: At the end of the day, even if all these other flaws can be addressed, no supervised practice system should be considered valid unless it demonstrably develops in its participants the competencies required for bar admission. It’s not enough to require principals to sign a document attesting that the student has “successfully completed” articles — such assurances have been rote for decades. Most regulators specify the competencies that articling must inculcate, but there is little or no independent assessment or determination of competence outcomes during or after articling. The absence of an evaluation framework converts what ought to be a thoroughly vetted development process into a mere rite of passage.