In January 2006 a bill has been submitted to the Spanish Parliament concerning access to the legal profession.

At present when students obtain their Law degree they automatically become legal practitioners. Any Law-degree holder (the course is completed over a five-year period), may be admitted to the Bar Association as from the next day he finishes he studies and from that very moment he may act as legal counsel in any matter regardless of its nature, complexity or amount.

Traditionally Spanish lawyers have insisted that Law graduates should be subject to a period of articles and training before they may practise law. All Bar Association Conferences (mainly the ones held in León (1970), Majorca (1989), Coruña (1995), Seville (1999) and finally Salamanca (2003)) have highlighted the need of providing supplementary practical training to the theoretical syllabus offered by law faculties in order to ensure that the protection of rights and freedoms entrusted to lawyers is sufficiently guaranteed.

In the past, several attempts in this direction were stymied by the negative response from Universities and law students. The Faculties of Law considered that students were sufficiently prepared after their graduation and students refused to become subject to further tests or requirements in order to become full-fledged lawyers once they had completed their studies.

Two factors have been decisive to trigger the passage of this bill. The first one was related to the fact that Spain was possibly the sole state within the European Union (at least before the last enlargement process) in which law students on obtaining their degree became automatically legal practitioners. The second factor ties in with an effective compliance of the Spanish Constitution mandate (articles 24 and 17.3) whereby citizens are entitled to an effective judicial protection in which obviously the role of legal practitioners is essential and this requires that they are adequately trained to achieve this purpose.

The draft –it must be taken into account that the passage of the bill in Parliament may entail future amendments of the initial text – contemplates the professional status of a lawyer required to act as a legal practitioner in all judicial proceedings or counselling activities foreseen in the current legislation. To this purpose, the holders of a Law degree must establish their professional qualification by taking part in training courses and securing a favourable evaluation in the terms envisaged in the future Act. Training courses may be organized and conducted by public or private Universities, Legal Training Schools or other training centres and will be completed by a period of articles supervised by a lawyer.

At the end of this period, the law graduate who wishes to become a lawyer must establish his professional competence by means of professional qualification evaluation conducted by a committee. These committees will be convened by the Ministries of Justice and Education and Science ensuring that members from the General Council of the Spanish Lawyers Association are present thereat.

The most controversial issues of this bill refer, on the one hand, to which institution will have more weight during the training period, whether Universities who hold fast to their educational competencies or the Bar Associations who consider that general theory should be taught at universities but practical training is the result of practising law; and, on the other hand, the provision whereby this statute will only become enforceable after a period of six years, an excessively long period that has been established to avoid student demonstrations.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.