Australian Solicitors CPD: 10 Units, Four Fields and the Conversion Rates That Catch People

Australia's CPD requirement for solicitors is set by a single instrument that applies across the participating jurisdictions, and it is more prescriptive than most practitioners realise. It fixes not only how many units you need but what a unit is for each kind of activity — and the conversion rates differ sharply depending on what you do.

This guide works through the Legal Profession Uniform Continuing Professional Development (Solicitors) Rules 2015, rule by rule. The Rules were developed by the Law Council of Australia under section 427 of the Legal Profession Uniform Law and made by the Legal Services Council under Part 9.2 of that Law. They came into operation on 1 July 2015.

Ten units, four fields

Rule 6.1 requires a solicitor to complete 10 CPD units in each CPD year, including at least one unit in each of four named fields:

• 6.1.1 ethics and professional responsibility
• 6.1.2 practice management and business skills
• 6.1.3 professional skills
• 6.1.4 substantive law

Note what the Rules do not do: they set a minimum of one unit per field and no maximum. The remaining six units can fall wherever the solicitor's practice needs take them. A compliance plan that allocates two or three units to each field is imposing a structure the Rules do not require.

Rule 5.1 defines the CPD year as beginning on 1 April and ending on 31 March the following year — which matters for any firm coordinating Australian practitioners with a UK or Irish calendar.

What qualifies as an activity

Rule 7.1 sets three tests, all of which must be met. The activity must be of significant intellectual or practical content and deal primarily with matters related to the solicitor's practice of law; be conducted by persons qualified by practical or academic experience in the subject covered; and extend the solicitor's knowledge and skills in areas relevant to their practice needs or professional development.

The second test is the one most often overlooked when a firm runs training in-house. The person delivering it has to be qualified in the subject by practical or academic experience — a well-intentioned session delivered by someone learning alongside the audience does not satisfy rule 7.1.2.

The five permitted formats

Rule 8.1 lists what an activity may consist of:

• 8.1.1 a seminar, workshop, lecture, conference, discussion group, multimedia or web-based program, private study of audio/visual material, or any other educational activity
• 8.1.2 research, preparation or editing of an article published in a legal publication, a legal article published in a non-legal publication, or published Law Reports or other legal services
• 8.1.3 preparation and/or presentation of written or oral material to be used in a CPD activity or other education provided to solicitors, other professionals, or people undertaking practical or supervised legal training
• 8.1.4 membership of a committee, taskforce or practice section of a professional association, the designated local regulatory authority or the Law Council of Australia, provided the solicitor regularly attends its meetings and the work is of substantial significance to the practice of law and reasonably likely to assist professional development
• 8.1.5 postgraduate studies relevant to the solicitor's practice needs

Rule 8.2 then carves private study out almost entirely: private study does not constitute a CPD activity unless it involves the private study of audio/visual material specifically designed to update the solicitor's knowledge or skills relevant to their practice needs. Reading a textbook or a judgment is not CPD under these Rules.

The conversion rates, which are the real trap

Rule 9.1 defines what a unit is, and the rate depends entirely on the format:

• One hour of activity for seminars and the like (8.1.1), preparing or presenting (8.1.3), and postgraduate study (8.1.5)
• 1,000 words of the article for writing (8.1.2)
• Two hours of activity for committee work (8.1.4)

So committee work earns at half rate, and a 2,000-word article earns two units regardless of how long it took to write.

Rule 9.2 then caps how much of the annual total each format may supply:

• no more than 5 units from writing (8.1.2)
• no more than 5 units from preparing or presenting (8.1.3)
• no more than 3 units from committee work (8.1.4)
• no more than 5 units from private study of audio/visual material (8.2)

Read together, those caps mean at least some of the ten units must come from attending or participating in something. A solicitor cannot write, present and sit on committees their way to ten.

One significant shortcut sits in rule 9.3: a solicitor who successfully completes a specialist accreditation assessment process is deemed to have completed all 10 units in the year of completion.

Starting or restarting mid-year

Rule 10.1 sets a pro rata table by renewal month, and it is unusually generous at the back end of the year:

April 10 units · May 9 · June 8 · July 7 · August 6 · September 5 · October 4 · November 3 · December 2 · January 1 · February and March, nil.

A solicitor commencing or recommencing practice in February or March owes no CPD units for that year at all.

Rule 11.1 permits a limited carry-forward: a maximum of 3 units accrued between 1 January and 31 March may be carried into the following CPD year, though any unit can only be counted in one year. There is no general banking of surplus.

Records: three years, and the 21-day clock

Rule 12.1 requires a solicitor to maintain, for each CPD year, both a record of their engagement in CPD activities and evidence in support of the activities undertaken. Rule 12.2 requires both to be retained for at least three years after the end of the CPD year concerned.

Rule 13.1 requires certification of compliance at the same time as applying to renew the practising certificate — so the declaration is annual and tied to renewal, not a separate return.

Rule 14.1 is the enforcement teeth: the designated local regulatory authority may at any time require a solicitor to verify compliance within 21 days, by producing the records required under the Rules and any other relevant evidence in their possession or control. Three years of retention against a 21-day production deadline is the practical reason to keep contemporaneous evidence rather than reconstructing it.

Non-compliance is remediated, not immediately punished

Rule 15 is notably constructive. It applies where a solicitor certifies that they have not complied, where the authority is not satisfied by the verification produced, or where the solicitor fails to comply with the certification or verification requirements at all.

The authority may then give written notice requiring the solicitor to submit a plan within 21 days setting out the steps they intend to take to rectify the non-compliance within 90 days of submitting that plan. The solicitor must comply with both the notice and the plan.

That is a materially different posture from regimes where a shortfall is a disciplinary matter from the outset — the Rules build in a structured route back to compliance before anything else happens.

Exemptions: seven named grounds, and an open list

Under rule 16.1 the designated local regulatory authority may exempt a solicitor wholly or partly from the CPD requirement, on written application (16.2). Rule 16.3 lists grounds without limiting them:

• illness or disability
• the location of the solicitor's legal practice
• absence from legal practice, for example parenting leave or unemployment
• reduced hours of practice owing to part-time or casual employment
• being required to hold a practising certificate while not engaged in legal practice
• having been in practice for more than 40 years and not practising as a principal
• hardship or other special circumstances

Two of those are worth drawing out. Part-time practice is an express ground for a reduction here, where the Law Society of Scotland expressly refuses to reduce its requirement for part-time solicitors. And the 40-year provision has no equivalent in the UK or Irish schemes at all.

Note also that a part exemption does not simply reduce the total — rule 6.2 addresses how the field requirements operate where a part exemption has been granted, so an exemption needs to be read alongside the four-field obligation rather than instead of it.

How it compares

Ten units with four mandatory fields, format-specific conversion rates and a 90-day rectification route is a different architecture from every other scheme in this library. The Law Society of Scotland's 20 hours turns on verifiability and refuses a part-time reduction; US CLE fragments across state accreditation; Australia fixes the arithmetic centrally and devolves only the exemptions.

For a firm with practitioners in more than one of these jurisdictions, the practical consequence is that a single training calendar cannot satisfy all of them. The activity that earns an hour in Scotland may earn 1,000-words-worth in Australia or nothing at all if it is private reading. Structured CPD programmes are worth mapping against each scheme's conversion rules rather than against hours attended.

Sources and limits: written from the Legal Profession Uniform Continuing Professional Development (Solicitors) Rules 2015, read in October 2026 from the Western Australian consolidation published under the Legal Profession Uniform Law Application Act 2022. The Rules are uniform across participating jurisdictions, but each jurisdiction's designated local regulatory authority administers them and may publish its own guidance, so confirm local administrative requirements. Rule 6.2's treatment of part exemptions and the Rules' compilation history were not set out in full here. Barristers are regulated under separate rules and are not covered. General information about published rules, not legal advice.