Continuing professional development (CPD) or continuing competence as the SRA term it, is an essential part of being a lawyer. The SRA and the firm require that you are competent to practise the type of law on which you advise and you are conversant with the legal and ethical rules.
All lawyers in Keystone must be legal experts in what they practise and keep themselves at that level, or, in the case of those who have not yet attained that level of knowledge, then they must be supervised appropriately by a subject matter expert. No Keystone lawyer may practise in an area in which they are not a true subject expert.
All lawyers in the firm must be conversant with the SRA Code for firms and all solicitors must be conversant with their ethical obligations. This includes the SRA Code for solicitors and the attendant guidance, of which there is a lot. For this reason, the firm has a sophisticated compliance offering and you will receive email updates on changes to applicable regulatory rules. Further, the Compliance team are there to answer your questions and your first port of call is our General Counsel.
You are required to undertake such CPD as you think you need in order to remain competent, you must reflect on your competence and practice and you must keep a written record of both your CPD and your reflections. All solicitors give an annual competence declaration as to their practice and their regulatory obligations when they renew their practising certificate. Accordingly, any failure to remain competent and to keep records becomes an honesty offence and thus a very serious matter.
The SRA has put together a toolkit on continuing competence see here, including these templates for record keeping https://www.sra.org.uk/solicitors/resources/continuing-competence/templates/. We have produced our own Continuing Competence Policy which links back to that SRA guidance. If you feel that the SRA templates are hard to use, then the firm offers a simpler alternative, but note whatever the recording method used, it is compliance with the rules that is your obligation.
Our alternative is in two parts:
Part 1 - evaluate your practice and record all the resources you review regularly. You need do this only once (see our CPD Self-evaluation and regular L&D record).
Part 2 - every time you undertake any learning and development activity you find useful, send yourself by email the notes/slides/copy of the article etc, and add to it your comments about it. Ignore anything you read that you did not find useful. Put that in an Outlook folder marked "CPD" (which you'll need to set up for this purpose).
Part 3 - Twice a year reflect on your practice (see our Reflection and Competence Record).
You can clock up CPD in a range of ways.