Geeklawyer is cur­rently hav­ing to engage in the Bars ongo­ing tire­some and never-ending require­ment to keep up to date with his legal edu­ca­tion and skills.

Known within the zoo as ‘Con­tin­u­ing Pro­fes­sional Edu­ca­tion’ or CPD this tire­some drudge is a mostly laud­able ini­tia­tive. How­ever it is over­done and weakly policed to the point of mak­ing in sig­nif­i­cantly inef­fec­tive. One has to do 12 hours a year of which at least 4 hours must be Bar ‘accred­ited’, that is the Bar must have given approval to the con­tents of the course, and the bal­ance can be unaccredited.

As one given to the occa­sional short cut Geeklawyer has been given to abus­ing the spirit if not the let­ter of the reg­u­la­tions. The trou­ble is, you see, that when one is busy earn­ing a liv­ing by depriv­ing oth­ers of theirs, one fre­quently has lit­tle time for tak­ing a day or half day off to do courses (on this point though hon­ourable men­tion has to be made of Charon QC’s sec­ond hobby). Nor, in truth, does he have much enthu­si­asm for being com­pelled to pro­vide a cap­tive mar­ket for course providers.

The result is that Geeklawyer has to scrape around for 8 hours of tes­tic­u­lar filler and 4 hours of the cheap­est course a tight-arse like him can find. The for­mer results in him claim­ing hours for arti­cles for ‘Wom­ens Sewing Monthly’ enti­tled “10 new pat­terns for mak­ing a barrister’s wig”, or for some com­puter pro­gram­mers mag­a­zine — found on the shelves of WH Smiths rather than Lincoln’s Inn’s law library — “How to make a for­tune suing your employer”, largely irrel­e­vant to his prac­tice. Or stuff like the talks given to crusties “Destroy­ing the gov­ern­ment legally”, or a favourite with anar­chists: “How to man­u­fac­turer and use WMD with­out leav­ing foren­sic traces and 10 guar­an­teed get-off excuses if caught.”

As for the lat­ter accred­ited course require­ment: when choos­ing courses Geeklawyer often chooses to select non­sense such as “Devel­op­ments in eccle­si­as­ti­cal law” because it is has a £10 fee rather than the £2500 for courses actu­ally rel­e­vant to him. All of which means he often has to claim to have a prac­tise in eccle­si­as­ti­cal law, medi­a­tion, crime, hous­ing, trusts and myr­iad other tosh he last saw at university.

Well, no, now you men­tion it I don’t have a solu­tion: this is just a rant. I hate the panic at the end of the year real­is­ing I need to pull my fin­ger out or lose my prac­tic­ing cer­tifi­cate or have to grovel cap in hand the the Bar coun­cil for an exten­sion of time.