Law Society of Ireland CPD Requirements: The 25-Hour Cycle Explained

Solicitors in Ireland work under a very different continuing professional development system to their counterparts in England and Wales. Where the SRA has moved away from fixed hours entirely, the Law Society of Ireland still runs a defined annual hours requirement — and one with specific rules about how those hours must be earned. If you're a solicitor in Ireland, or you manage training for a firm with Irish-qualified staff, getting the structure of the 25-hour cycle right matters more than it might first appear.

The headline requirement: 25 hours a year

Under the Law Society of Ireland's CPD Scheme, most practising solicitors must complete 25 hours of CPD in each annual cycle, which runs from 1 January to 31 December. That's a materially higher bar than many other professional CPD schemes, and it isn't a single undifferentiated pool of hours — specific categories must be covered within it.

The categories within the 25 hours

At least 5 hours must be dedicated to professional development and solicitor wellbeing. At least 3 hours must cover client care and professional standards. These aren't optional extras layered on top of the 25-hour total; they're carved out of it, which means a solicitor can't satisfy the full requirement purely with technical legal update courses in their own practice area, however useful those are.

There's a further layer for solicitors in particular roles. Sole practitioners and compliance or AML compliance partners must include at least 1 hour of accounting and anti-money laundering compliance training within their overall CPD hours. Given how central AML compliance is to a firm's regulatory risk, this isn't a box worth leaving until the last week of the cycle.

The 25 hours is the standard minimum, not the figure for every solicitor. The Law Society allows the requirement to be modified for circumstances such as newly admitted solicitors, Senior Practitioners (who need 8 hours for the 2026 cycle), leave, illness, retirement, unemployment and part-time or part-year practice. A modified requirement cannot fall below 3 hours of client care and professional standards, and for sole practitioners and compliance partners it cannot fall below 8 hours.

The rule that catches people out: the 80/20 split

This is the detail that trips up firms that have built their training around a single online subscription. The Law Society of Ireland requires that at least 5 hours — 20% of the total — be completed as group study undertaken in person. A maximum of 20 hours, or 80%, can be satisfied through e-learning.

In practice, this means a purely online CPD subscription cannot, on its own, satisfy the annual requirement for a standard full-time solicitor, no matter how many hours of content it contains. Firms need to build in genuine in-person group study — whether that's attending seminars, in-house training sessions attended in person, conference attendance, or other formats that meet the "group study, in person" definition — alongside their online learning. Training plans that ignore this split will leave solicitors short at declaration time regardless of how much e-learning they've logged.

Group study has a specific meaning. The Law Society counts a session as group study only if it is an organised session with three or more people, lasting at least 30 minutes, with physical attendance. Watching a live feed does not count as group study, so a webinar attended alone at your desk is e-learning for this purpose. The Society also caps CPD at 7 hours in any single day.

How this compares to other jurisdictions

The contrast with England and Wales is instructive. The SRA has no fixed hours requirement at all and instead asks solicitors to reflect on competence and evidence relevant learning. The Bar Standards Board takes a middle path — fixed hours for new practitioners, then an outcomes-based approach once established. Ireland's 25-hour cycle, with its category minimums and in-person requirement, sits at the more prescriptive end of that spectrum. For firms operating across both jurisdictions, it's worth building separate training plans rather than assuming one CPD programme design will satisfy both regulators — a course that fully meets SRA expectations around competence-mapping won't automatically tick the Law Society of Ireland's category and format requirements.

Building a compliant CPD plan

A practical approach for Irish firms is to map the cycle at the start of the year rather than after the fact. Block out the 5 hours of professional development and wellbeing and the 3 hours of client care and professional standards as fixed, non-negotiable line items, add the AML/accounting hour for anyone in a relevant role, and then plan the remaining hours as a mix that keeps at least a quarter of the total in genuine in-person group settings — comfortably clearing the 20% in-person minimum even allowing for a session or two falling through. Leaving the in-person component to be arranged reactively near the cycle deadline tends to be where firms run into availability problems, since seminar and conference dates are fixed well in advance.

It's also worth remembering that the CPD Scheme exists to support real competence, not just paperwork. Solicitors who choose their remaining hours based on where their practice genuinely needs development — a particular area of litigation procedure, a technical update relevant to their caseload — get more out of the cycle than those who default to whatever's most convenient to book.

How many CPD hours do Irish solicitors need each year?

Full-time practising solicitors in Ireland must complete 25 hours of CPD per annual cycle under the Law Society of Ireland's CPD Scheme, including specific minimum hours in defined categories.

Can I complete all my CPD hours online?

No. A maximum of 20 hours (80%) may be completed through e-learning. At least 5 hours (20%) must be group study undertaken in person, so an online-only subscription cannot satisfy the full annual requirement on its own.

Do all solicitors need AML-specific CPD hours?

Sole practitioners and compliance or AML compliance partners must include at least 1 hour of accounting and anti-money laundering compliance training within their overall CPD hours. Other solicitors aren't subject to this specific carve-out but should still maintain relevant AML awareness.

What happens if a solicitor doesn't meet the client care and professional standards minimum?

The 3-hour client care and professional standards minimum is a distinct category requirement within the 25-hour total, not an optional extra — solicitors need to plan for it specifically rather than assuming general CPD activity will cover it by default.

The 25-hour cycle rewards planning. Firms that map categories, book in-person sessions early, and treat the AML and client care minimums as fixed commitments tend to reach the end of the cycle with a clean, straightforward declaration — rather than a late scramble to find qualifying hours.

What counts, and what the format rules do to your plan

The 25 hours are not interchangeable. The Scheme sets out how CPD may be completed, and each route carries its own cap.

• Group study — at least five hours. This is the one element with a floor rather than a ceiling. Group study means physical attendance at an organised session with three or more people present. There is no upper limit on group study beyond the daily cap.
• eLearning — up to 20 hours. Eighty per cent of a standard requirement can be met online. Where a solicitor's requirement has been modified downwards, at least five hours of eLearning remains claimable.
• Published written material — up to 12.5 hours. Half the requirement can come from writing, but the material must be legal in nature, published in a legal periodical or textbook, and involve genuine legal analysis rather than a restatement of the law.

Two smaller rules catch people out. No activity counts unless it runs for more than thirty continuous minutes, so a run of short internal briefings adds nothing to the record. And no more than seven hours may be claimed in any single 24-hour period, which rules out clearing most of a cycle at one two-day conference.

The accounting and AML hour

Sole practitioners, compliance partners and anti-money laundering compliance partners carry an additional obligation inside the three hours of client care and professional standards: at least one of those hours must cover accounting and anti-money laundering compliance. It applies equally to senior practitioners on the reduced eight-hour requirement.

One hour is a floor, not a programme. Irish firms also have a separate statutory training duty under section 54 of the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010, which reaches everyone in the firm and is not discharged by the compliance partner attending a single CPD session. Our guide to section 54 AML training requirements sets out what that duty actually covers.

The current Scheme runs to the end of 2026

The 25-hour requirement arrived with the Scheme that took effect on 1 January 2024, made under the 2017 Regulations as amended in 2023. It replaced a 20-hour requirement built on a different category structure, and the published Scheme booklet covers the 2024, 2025 and 2026 cycles.

That matters for anyone planning beyond this year. The Law Society reviews and reissues the Scheme periodically, and the last review moved both the total and the categories — the senior practitioner requirement went from three hours to eight in the same change. Build a 2027 plan against the Scheme published for 2027 rather than assuming the current one rolls forward unchanged.

Related CPD guides

• Solicitor CPD requirements in Ireland
• Legal CPD in Ireland and the UK: the complete guide
• SRA continuing competence explained for solicitors
• Bar Standards Board CPD requirements for barristers
• Legal ethics CPD for solicitors and barristers

This article is general information, not legal advice. The Law Society of Ireland updates its CPD Scheme from time to time, so check the current requirements for your cycle with the Law Society's CPD Compliance Unit before finalising a training plan.