How barristers’ CPD actually works
Since the Bar Standards Board replaced accredited hours with the Established Practitioners Programme, CPD at the Bar has been self-directed. A barrister reflects on their practice, sets written learning objectives for the year, completes activities that serve those objectives, and keeps a record they can produce if the BSB asks for it. There are no mandated courses, no points, and no accreditation of providers.
That structure cuts both ways. It gives members complete freedom over what to learn, and it puts the burden of choosing well, and recording honestly, on the individual. An objective is only as good as the record behind it.
Why AI belongs in this year’s objectives
Three things changed the calculation. First, the failures reached the courts: in Ayinde v Haringey [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin) the Divisional Court dealt with fabricated authorities in filed documents, and its judgment made clear that those with leadership responsibilities, including heads of chambers, are expected to take practical and effective measures on the safe use of AI. Second, the regulator moved: the BSB’s Guidance on the use of AI and Other Technologies came into force in May 2026, reading AI into the existing Core Duties, from competence to confidentiality to the duty to the court, and the Bar Council maintains its own generative-AI guidance alongside it. Third, the tools stopped being avoidable: instructing solicitors use them, opponents use them, and members of every set already use them privately, trained or not.
Against that background, “understand generative AI well enough to use it safely in practice” is about as defensible as a learning objective gets. It is specific, it is current, and the regulator’s own guidance points at it.
What good AI training for barristers covers
A session worth recording against a CPD objective covers the ground a practitioner actually needs:
- Capabilities and failure modes. What these systems do well, and precisely how they fail, because invented citations and confident wrongness are the failures that end up before a judge.
- The guidance, plainly read. What the Bar Council guidance and the BSB’s expectations amount to in practice, without either alarmism or salesmanship.
- A verification workflow. A repeatable habit for checking AI-assisted research and drafting before it goes anywhere that matters. This is the single highest-value hour in any programme.
- Confidentiality and privilege boundaries. What must never go into a consumer AI account, and what a chambers-safe setup looks like instead.
- Hands-on practice. Realistic exercises from the members’ own practice areas, because judgement about the tools only comes from using them under guidance.
Recording it
For the CPD record, a structured session gives you the pieces the EPP asks for: the objective it served, the provider and format, the learning outcomes, and your own reflection on what changes in practice. We provide a session outline and written learning objectives with every workshop for exactly that purpose. To be clear about the boundary: no AI course at the Bar is “accredited”, ours included, because no accreditation exists. What a good course is, is structured to support the CPD framework barristers already work within.
Neura North runs live, on-site AI workshops for barristers’ chambers: a £750 leadership briefing and a £2,500 half-day for the whole set. The clerks’ room side of the story, automating chambers administration itself, lives on our barristers’ chambers page.