BC will join five other provinces and territories in assessing candidates via a skills-based course
British Columbia will be the sixth jurisdiction to allow aspiring lawyers to pursue licensing without taking bar exams, in a move that the province’s legal regulator says will help eliminate discrimination barriers and redirect bar candidates’ focus to developing practical skills prioritized by other western provinces.
Announced by the Law Society of BC at the end of October, the decision came roughly a month after the Law Society of Ontario said it was seeking public feedback on a proposal to replace its own bar exams with a mandatory skills-based course.
The Ontario proposal has drawn mixed but largely negative feedback from lawyers across the province, with Ontario Attorney General Doug Downey posting on X this week that “any changes that water down standards by scrapping written exams simply aren’t acceptable.”
But LSBC President Brook Greenberg says in his view, the bar exam – or at least the barrister and solicitor exams that aspiring licensees currently have to take in BC – “don’t demonstrate any real competencies.”
“They don’t really even test knowledge,” Greenberg told Canadian Lawyer on Wednesday. “Either it’s a closed book exam, which means it’s a memory test, or it’s an open book exam, and it really tests people's ability to look things up quickly,” Greenberg adds. “Neither of those are particularly important skills for a lawyer.” Greenberg clarified that this particular opinion is his own and does not reflect the views of the LSBC.
He adds that the legal regulator’s new approach focuses on competencies instead.
Under BC’s current licensing regime for lawyers, licensing candidates must complete nine months of articling, take a 10-week skills-based training program called the Professional Legal Training Course, and pass separate barrister and solicitor exams. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the PLTC has been operated as a remote program, training candidates on advocacy, writing, contract drafting, and interviewing skills. Candidates are separately assessed on each skill throughout the intensive, full-time program.
Set to launch in September 2026, the new regime will replace the PLTC and the barrister and solicitor exams with a single Practice Readiness Education Program, commonly referred to as PREP. Unlike the PLTC, candidates have the option to either take PREP full-time over 11 weeks or part-time over nine months. Candidates will complete assignments, workshops, and work on client files at a fictional, virtual law firm before being evaluated on their oral and written skills, as well as ethics, at the program’s conclusion.
The Canadian Centre for Professional Legal Education, which also designed the bar admission programs in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Nunavut, designed PREP. None of those provinces administer traditional bar exams.
Greenberg says the LSBC decided to phase out the PLTC in favour of PREP for several reasons. In 2024, the LSBC, along with the law societies of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, developed the Western Canada Competency Profile. Although it has not yet been implemented, the profile identifies competencies that the provinces expect of new lawyers, including those related to ethics, reconciliation, and critical thinking. The WCCP also serves as a benchmark that each law society can use to ensure its bar admission programs are equipping licensing candidates with the right skills.
Unlike the PLTC, PREP will allow candidates to demonstrate that they have the competencies expected under the WCCP, Greenberg says. Another reason for transitioning to the new program was that the PLTC, which has been part of the bar admission process in BC for over four decades, was initially designed for in-person use.
“There were some things that didn’t translate well to an online course,” Greenberg says. “On the flip side, we understood that [for] many students, there were barriers to them taking PLTC when it was entirely in person because coming to the Lower Mainland is expensive and difficult.”
Greenberg says benchers also considered how PREP could address discrimination concerns involving the barrister and solicitor exams. He points to a 2022 report prepared for the LSBC by a consultant, which references an American Bar Association survey. That survey found that among first-time bar exam takers in 2020, white candidates passed the exam at a higher rate than Asian, Hispanic, or Black candidates. Allowing students to complete PREP on a part-time basis also provides flexibility to candidates who can’t afford to put their articling or other work obligations on hold.
Ellison Mallin, a third-year student at the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Law and president of the law students’ association, says the upcoming transition to PREP has been helpful for law firms, too. Mallin had initially registered to complete the PLTC in September 2026 but withdrew after the LSBC announced the transition to PREP, giving him the option to complete that program instead.
A big part of Mallin’s decision to choose PREP was his employer, whom he’ll start articling for next year alongside another articling student. Because the 10-week PLTC program is so intensive and is only offered a few times a year, licensing candidates typically take time off from articling to complete the program and prepare for the bar exams.
“It’s… weeks where we’re just doing PLTC,” Mallin says. “So we have to coordinate that between us so that we’re not doing the same [10] week period.
“With the PREP course, the nine-month course is just part-time on top of your article, and so there’s no coordination needed,” he says. “We can both do it at the same time and both commit to articling with our firm for that entire nine-month period as well.”
In Ontario, much of the discourse around the elimination of the province’s bar exams has focused on how the move could lower the bar for becoming a lawyer. While similar concerns are present in BC, those concerns appear somewhat tempered by the view that the barrister and solicitor exams are not necessarily more challenging than the PLTC assessments, which are not required in Ontario.
“Based on anecdotal evidence and just general information that I’ve acquired from working at the law society in the past, if students do fail a component of their licensing process, it’s usually one of the assessments of the PLTC,” says Ingvar Suvorin, an associate at Vancouver and Victoria-based firm Bojm, Funt & Gibbons LLP. Suvorin previously worked at the LSBC as an analyst.
He adds that lawyers from other jurisdictions that already use PREP in different provinces have indicated to him that it seems “about as challenging as PLTC in terms of completion of the assessments.”
Mallin agreed that the bar exams are not always where candidates flounder. “People stress over the bar exam, but more people fail the assessments,” he observed.
Suvorin rejected the idea that “not having the bar exams somehow jeopardizes the quality of lawyers that are going to be emerging on the other end.”
“That would mean that effectively any lawyer that’s getting licensed in Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or Nova Scotia is somehow worse than lawyers coming out of BC or Ontario just because there are bar exams,” he says, adding that the notion is “extremely unfair.”
Still, Mallin says he knows several law students who are considering taking the barrister and solicitor exams even though they’ve been given the option to register for PREP instead, based on the idea that the exams might be more challenging. One of those students has already confirmed his choice. “It seems like he takes a lot of pride in being able to ascertain his skills, and the PLTC, he feels, is a better reflection of that,” Mallin says, adding that the other students he’s spoken to want to make sure they can demonstrate their skills for future employers.
While Greenberg, who is a partner at Fasken Martineau Dumoulin LLP, says he personally doesn’t believe a job candidate’s hireability should hinge on whether or not they’ve taken bar exams, he notes that “there are lawyers who’ve said that they don’t agree with the elimination of the bar exam – they think that it’s an important gate for people to get through.
“So there could be people who think that and would take that into account in who they hire,” he adds. “I wouldn’t blame students for having that in mind.”
