The Law Society of Ontario’s deadline for commenting on its proposal to scrap bar exams was Jan. 31
Months after the Law Society of Ontario announced it was considering scrapping its bar exams, some of Ontario’s largest legal organizations are telling the regulator that while they are not opposed to reforming the licensing process per se, they are concerned that the proposed changes are not adequately grounded in data, will raise costs for candidates, and will take away an objective measure for evaluating candidates’ skills.
The Ontario Bar Association, the Advocates’ Society, and the Toronto Lawyers’ Association are among the organizations that wrote to the LSO in late January, in response to the regulator’s call for comments about the proposed changes. The deadline for submitting a response was Jan. 31.
The LSO unveiled its proposed plan to eliminate Ontario’s barrister and solicitor exams for aspiring lawyers in September. In a report, an LSO committee said the proposal was motivated by multiple factors, including the increased number of internationally-trained law graduates applying to become lawyers in Ontario over the last 10 years; concerns that the exams, which are open book, forced candidates to focus on quick retrieval skills rather than understanding legal concepts; and a desire for consistency with other provinces, some of which have already eliminated their bar exams.
The committee proposed replacing the exams with a course that would train candidates in the skills they would need to practise law, such as practice management, communication, client relationship management, and professional ethics. Candidates would be tested on different skills during the training cycle.
The skills-based course would be partly modelled on the Practice Readiness Education Program that candidates must complete to practise law in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Nunavut. None of those jurisdictions administers traditional bar exams. British Columbia is also slated to replace its bar exam with the program, otherwise known as PREP, in September 2026.
The committee’s proposal elicited swift backlash from Ontario’s legal community, including Ontario Attorney General Doug Downey, who posted on X last fall that “any changes that water down standards by scrapping written exams simply aren’t acceptable.”
In its call for comments, the LSO committee posed two questions to stakeholders: whether they agreed with its proposal to replace the bar exams with a skills-based course, and what concerns they had with the implementation.
Below are highlights from the submissions the Ontario Bar Association, the Advocates’ Society, and the Toronto Lawyers’ Association gave to the LSO in response to these questions.
All three organizations emphasized that they were not opposed to changes to Ontario’s lawyer licensing process, particularly those that would focus on better equipping licensing candidates with the practical skills required to practise law. However, all three organizations argued that passing an “objective” assessment in the form of a written, standardized test should still be mandatory for aspiring lawyers.
The OBA said its concerns are rooted in fairness. While the barrister and solicitor exams rely on standardized grading, a skills-based course “would require human grading, introducing error and fairness issues associated with the subjective nature of the marker which could result in different grades to similar qualities of work.”
The association suggested that this shift away from standardized grading could erode confidence in the licensing process. “The mere perception of bias is enough to undermine both candidates’ sense of fairness and the public’s trust in the profession,” the OBA said.
The Advocates’ Society President Hilary Book echoed the OBA’s concerns about fairness and the erosion of public confidence, arguing that preserving standardized testing in the licensing process would provide “an objective gatekeeping mechanism with respect to the minimum competencies required to enter practice.”
While the LSO had noted in its report that the bar exams had negatively impacted the mental health of some candidates, Book argued that “practising law (including litigation) is stressful, requires lawyers to meet short deadlines under pressure, and does frequently necessitate the rapid retrieval of information.”
TLA President Anna Wong acknowledged that evidence from other jurisdictions, including those in Canada, suggests that in their current form, the Ontario bar exams have “limited relevance for everyday legal practice” since they exclusively feature “time-pressured multiple-choice questions.”
However, Wong said the TLA supports implementing a “blended” licensing process that combines a standardized test with skills-based training and assessments, rather than scrapping the bar exams altogether.
In its submission, the OBA argued that the proposal to scrap Ontario’s bar exams was not grounded in enough data. The association noted that the LSO committee’s report relied heavily on research by the Institute for the Advancement of American Legal System, a University of Denver think tank, and suggested reviewing additional research on the effectiveness of standardized tests, such as the bar exams.
The OBA also said the committee failed to cite any data on the effectiveness of reforms in the Canadian jurisdictions that have already eliminated bar exams, which could be measured via qualitative data on whether professional conduct complaints have increased, or whether candidates believed the skills-based programs adequately assessed their competency or equipped them with the right skills.
The TLA, meanwhile, provided a brief overview of other jurisdictions that have moved towards models of lawyer licensing that “combine clear competence frameworks, multiple assessment methods, and structured experiential learning,” including parts of Canada and the US, England, Wales, and Australia.
“Research shows that closed-book, time-pressured multiple choice question-style tests are weak measures of readiness for practice,” Wong wrote. “Performance-based assessments and supervised practice better reflect the work new lawyers actually perform.”
Wong added that “Ontario’s current lawyer licensing candidate assessment process is increasingly out of step with other jurisdictions’ assessment processes.”
However, she repeated that “it may nonetheless be advisable to retain a limited multiple-choice component as it provides a standardized and scalable mechanism for assessing baseline competence across candidates, consistent with approaches adopted in other jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom.”
All three organizations raised concerns about the potential cost burdens of a new skills-based program. While the LSO committee said that licensing candidates who participate in a skills-based program would have to pay a fee that “offsets the ongoing operational costs,” the exact cost would need to be established through a request-for-proposals process.
The OBA expressed concern about the lack of clarity on how much candidates would have to pay and how much the LSO would have to commit to developing and implementing the skills-based course.
On behalf of the Advocates’ Society, Book noted that many law firms cover the costs of the licensing process for students they have offered positions to. A skills-based course that spans several months could increase costs, forcing smaller firms to reduce the number of articling positions they provide or the portion of bar admission expenses they are willing to pay.
Higher costs would also be burdensome for candidates without firms covering their fees. “The cost of a bar course risks creating further practical barriers to law practice, particularly for candidates from communities underrepresented in the legal profession,” Book wrote.
According to Wong, the TLA’s view is that “any reforms to the lawyer licensing candidate assessment process should result in proportionate increased costs for lawyer licensing candidates for cost recovery purposes only, and no increase in current lawyer licensees’ annual LSO fees.”
