Brazil and the OAB: Why Advogados Have No CPD Requirement

Brazil imposes no continuing education requirement on advogados. There are no hours, no points, no cycle, no filing and no audit. The Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil operates one of the most demanding entry examinations in the world and then, once a lawyer is inscribed, asks nothing further of them in training terms.

This surprises people who know the Brazilian profession, because the OAB runs a substantial national education arm and the word used for continuing education, educação continuada, appears in its own instruments. The distinction that matters is between an institution created to provide continuing education and a rule that requires it. Brazil has the first and not the second.

What the Estatuto requires

The profession is governed by the Estatuto da Advocacia e da OAB, Lei 8.906 of 4 July 1994. Its entry conditions are in Article 8, and they are one-off: civil capacity, a law degree, approval in the Exame de Ordem under Article 8(IV), and the formal undertaking. Nothing in Article 8 recurs.

The grounds on which an inscription can be cancelled or suspended are equally instructive. Article 11 deals with cancelamento and Article 12 with licenciamento. Between them the grounds are a request by the lawyer, exclusion as a disciplinary penalty, death, taking up an incompatible activity, loss of one of the requirements for inscription, and mental illness. There is no education-related ground. A Brazilian lawyer cannot lose their inscription for failing to train, because failing to train is not a listed ground.

The word aperfeiçoamento, meaning improvement or refinement, does appear in the Estatuto, but only as an institutional aim: Article 44(I), among the OAB purposes, and Article 54(XV), on the Conselho Federal role in assisting the improvement of law courses. The phrases educação continuada and Escola do not appear in the statute at all.

Article 33 is the hinge. It obliges the advogado to comply rigorously with the duties set out in the Código de Ética e Disciplina, which is where any professional duty of self-improvement would have to live.

The one provision that resembles a CPD duty

The Código de Ética e Disciplina, the single annex to Resolução 02/2015, was signed in Brasília on 19 October 2015, published in the Diário Oficial da União on 4 November 2015, and came into force on 1 September 2016 under Article 79 as amended by Resolução 03/2016.

It contains exactly one provision bearing on continuing development. Article 2, sole paragraph, item IV requires the advogado to empenhar-se, permanentemente, no aperfeiçoamento pessoal e profissional, that is, to strive permanently for personal and professional improvement.

That is a general ethical duty and nothing more. It carries no hours, no points, no cycle, no reporting obligation and no verification mechanism. It is closer in character to a statement of professional values than to a compliance requirement, and it cannot be measured, so it cannot be audited.

Two other provisions touch education without creating an obligation. Article 71(V) gives the Tribunais de Ética e Disciplina the power to organise, promote and deliver courses, lectures and seminars, which is an institutional competence. Article 32, sole paragraph, confirms that paid teaching at the OAB schools of advocacy is not an impediment to practice. The phrases educação continuada, capacitação and Escola Superior de Advocacia do not appear in the Código at all.

The ESA Nacional: a provider, not a regulator

The body most often mistaken for evidence of a Brazilian CPD requirement is the Escola Superior de Advocacia Nacional, created in its current form by Provimento 193/2019 of 7 October 2019, which renamed the former Escola Nacional de Advocacia.

Read its purpose clause carefully, because the verbs are the whole point. Article 2 states that its purpose is to fomentar a educação continuada, to foster continuing education. Article 2(I) is to viabilizar a educação continuada de qualidade para os advogados de todas as localidades do País, to make quality continuing education feasible for lawyers everywhere in the country. Article 16 gives it didactic and pedagogical autonomy, and Article 20 excludes the state-level schools of advocacy from its scope.

Every one of those is a supply-side function. The Provimento creates a body to promote and deliver continuing education. It imposes no obligation on any lawyer, sets no hours and attaches no penalty. The same is true of the funding power in Article 56, paragraph 2 of the Regulamento Geral, which permits a seccional to maintain a cultural fund that may pay for study prizes, competitions, courses, research projects and cultural events. A power to fund courses is not a duty to attend them.

The Exame de Ordem is the gate, and it is the only one

Brazil rigour sits entirely at entry. The Exame de Ordem is governed by Provimento 144/2011 as amended by Provimento 174/2016; the earlier Provimento 136/2009 is marked as revoked on the OAB own site. It is a national examination, required of every candidate for inscription regardless of where they studied, and its pass rates are famously low.

The design logic is coherent even if one disagrees with it. Brazil screens hard once, at the point of entry, and then relies on market discipline, the courts, and the disciplinary system to maintain standards thereafter. Jurisdictions with mandatory CPD make the opposite trade: a lighter entry gate and a recurring obligation.

Consequence of non-compliance

There is none, and there is no mechanism by which there could be. There is no measurable standard to breach, no filing to miss, no audit to fail and no registration consequence. Article 11 of the Estatuto does not permit cancellation on educational grounds.

The only theoretical route runs through Article 2, sole paragraph, item IV of the Código de Ética. A sufficiently egregious failure of competence could in principle engage that duty in disciplinary proceedings. But no disciplinary provision is keyed to education, no hours or points appear anywhere in the OAB normative framework, and in practice a competence failure would be prosecuted as a competence failure rather than as a training deficit.

What this means for training providers

Brazil is a large market with no compliance driver, which makes it a different proposition from most of the jurisdictions a provider might consider.

• There is no accreditation scheme for continuing education providers, because there is no requirement to accredit against. Any claim that a course is OAB-approved for continuing education purposes is describing something that does not exist as a regulatory category.
• The ESA Nacional and the state ESAs are competitors, not accreditors. They are the OAB own delivery arms, operating in the same voluntary market, with the advantage of the OAB name.
• Demand is real but driven by career and specialisation, not by compliance. The committee structure, the specialist bars and Brazil highly segmented practice areas generate genuine appetite for advanced training. It simply has to be sold on its merits.
• Language is not optional. Brazil profession works in Portuguese, its instruments are in Portuguese, and the market will not accept English-language material as a substitute for the national regime.

A caveat on the sources

Two limits are worth stating plainly, because a negative finding deserves more scepticism than a positive one.

First, the OAB maintains 228 provimentos across its legislation index. The research behind this guide reviewed the pages covering 2016 to 2021, which includes the whole period in which the ESA was reorganised, and found Provimento 193/2019 to be the only instrument on continuing education. The negative is firm on the Estatuto, the Regulamento Geral and the Código de Ética, all of which were read directly. It is not an exhaustive enumeration of all 228.

Second, the Regulamento Geral as published carries no date on its face, so it is not possible to confirm from the document itself which amendments it incorporates.

Anyone relying on the absence of a requirement for a commercial decision should check the current position with the Conselho Federal rather than on this guide.

How Brazil compares

Brazil belongs to a small group of large jurisdictions that regulate entry hard and then leave continuing competence to the professional own judgement. India takes the same approach, with a mandatory entrance examination and no continuing requirement, though India is now under a Supreme Court direction to its regulator to build a framework, which Brazil is not.

Set against that, Kenya requires five units a year and makes non-compliance an act of professional misconduct, and solicitors in the United Kingdom and Ireland work under either a declared competence regime or a fixed annual hour count.

Nothing in the OAB published instruments suggests Brazil is moving. There is no proposal, no pilot and no gazetted scheme awaiting commencement, only a general ethical duty that has sat in the Código since 2016, and a national school whose job is to make training available to those who want it.