CPD Outline
The Lawyers and Conveyancers Act (Lawyers: Ongoing Legal Education - Continuing Professional Development) Rules 2013 (CPD Rules) requires lawyers who provide regulated services to complete 10 CPD hours each year. The CPD year runs from April to March.
Lawyers who hold practising certificates but do not provide regulated services are not required to complete any hours of CPD activities but will still need to prepare a continuing professional development plan and record (CPDPR) and file declarations to that effect. For more information on this, refer to the New Zealand Law Society's website.
At the end of the CPD year, lawyers must declare that they have completed their CPDPR and that they have completed the minimum CPD hours (or that they do not provide regulated services). It is important to keep track of your CPD and complete a CPDPR. The Regulator – the Law Society – may opt to audit any lawyer’s compliance with the CPD Rules. It is intended that the audit process is supportive and non-punitive. However, false declarations of compliance will be reported to a lawyers standards committee.
What activities count towards CPD?
CPD activities must align with the practitioner’s CPDPR. For detailed guidance on eligible activity types and the applicable rules, please refer to the regulator’s website.
Certain limitations apply to what may be counted as CPD. In particular, activities must include an element of feedback or interactivity. This requirement affects recorded content, as recordings without an interactive component are not considered eligible. To meet this standard, the NZBA provides a quiz with each recording, which viewers are required to complete. They should retain the quiz for their records.
Please contact us if you have any questions.
Keeping track of CPD Activities
The NZBA keeps track of attendance at our live CPD webinars and loads them against your account. This is to help you keep track of your activities and to update your CPDPR. Along with date and hours, some potential learning objectives, that may or may not apply to you, but which might help with completing your CPDPR.
To view your NZBA CPD activities:
- Log in and visit your profile on our member portal.
- Navigate to the CPD Tab.
- Click on View CPD entries.
If you have ordered an on-demand product, you will need to add this to your profile yourself. To manually add your own CPD to the NZBA record, follow these steps.