Bar exam, appeal to the government for an extension of the 'enhanced oral'

An urgent appeal to the Government to extend the transitional regime of the andbar exam also for the session 2026. Addressing the executive, after the National Association of Young Lawyers, is the Organismo congressuale forense. The request is to avert the automatic return of the three written tests (civil opinion, criminal opinion and judicial deed), done by hand and without annotated codes. Without regulatory intervention, which is absent in the Milleproroghe, Article 46 of the legal system (Law 247/2012), which provides for the old scheme suspended during the pandemic, would in fact be applicable again.

A return that the Ocf, asks to be averted, also because it is no longer in line with the training path actually followed by practitioners. "In recent years, in fact, the Forensic Schools have structured their programmes on the basis of the simplified regime of the "strengthened oral exam", extended by the legislator. Thousands of aspiring lawyers have completed training cycles calibrated on that final examination model. The sudden re-establishment of the ordinary system," reads the Ocf note, "would therefore lead to an obvious disconnect between the training received and the examination procedures, affecting the legitimate expectations of trainees and creating organisational difficulties for the training structures, which have not had time to convert the didactic programmes towards the manual drafting of traditional written tests.

But the training problem is not the only one that makes the restoration of the pre-Covid examination inappropriate. The Organismo congressional forensic organisation also stresses the systemic incoherence of a full return to the 2012 model at a time when Parliament is examining Bill 2629 (the so-called Nordio reform), which envisages an intermediate set-up based on two written tests, use of word processing and consultation of annotated codes. It would be unreasonable, according to the Organism, to subject exclusively the 2026 session to a more onerous regime that is bound to be changed soon. Circumstances that are not secondary and that make - the Bar specifies - the introduction of a bridging discipline that temporarily confirms the simplified modalities, guaranteeing coherence between training and examination, protection of trust, regulatory stability and legal certainty more appropriate than ever. "The objective is not to claim simplifications," the lawyers state, "but to ensure a access to the profession based on clear, predictable and consistent rules, respecting the young trainees who represent the future of the Italian Bar".

The Aiga had already addressed the government with regard to both the failure to extend the modalities of the forensic examination and the non-extension of the system currently in force for access to the register of cashiers. Choices branded as short-sighted and harmful. This at a time when the Faculty of Law seems to have lost its appeal as demonstrated by the 39.4% drop in little more than ten years photographed by the Report on the Bar in 2025. And on the causes of the lower propensity to choose a toga, the same Report also includes the uncertainties about the bar exam, which has undergone several changes over the years. It has gone from three written tests and an oral to two orals in the Covid period, to one written test and one oral. From 2020 to 2023, the number of candidates went from 22,750 in 2020 to 17,925 in 2021, 14,395 in 2022 to 9,703 in 2023. With a recovery in 2024 - compared to the drastic drops in previous years - in which the number of registrations was around 11,164.