1. Framing the Issue: A Low Pass Rate and What Lies Behind the Numbers
The results of the first sitting of the 2026 lawyer traineeship examination were announced by the Vietnam Bar Federation on 22 June 2026. The official notice was accompanied by score sheets for the northern and southern regions, providing a publicly available basis for cross-referencing figures, score levels, and pass or fail outcomes for each candidate [1]. According to a compilation drawn from the score sheets published with the notice, the pass rate for this examination was low; certain independent tallies of the score sheets indicate that the number of passing candidates was approximately one-third of those assessed [2]. Although the statistical methodology must be further standardised to exclude absent candidates, exempted candidates, and data anomalies, the fact of a very high failure rate is a datum that cannot be taken lightly.
More noteworthy than the overall pass rate is the structure of the failures. The most prominent bottleneck lies in the practical skills component—the part most closely aligned with the competencies a lawyer must demonstrate upon entering practice: reading a case file, identifying legal issues, selecting grounds, organising arguments, managing procedural risk, and handling client instructions within the limits of professional ethics. If the skills component is where many candidates failed, the cause should not be reduced to individual failure on the part of learners; it must be situated within the entirety of the process the system has used to produce those candidates.
A person admitted to the lawyer traineeship examination does not appear from a vacuum. That person has completed an undergraduate law programme, a lawyer vocational training programme, a period of traineeship at a law practice organisation, and has received confirmation from a supervising lawyer and a bar association. Each of those steps nominally constitutes training or quality control. When the final results reveal that a large number of learners have not demonstrated minimum professional competence, the question no longer belongs to the examination alone. It becomes a question about the quality of the entire professional-formation chain.
Two reactions are commonly encountered, yet neither is sufficiently rigorous. The first treats a high failure rate as a manifestation of excessive severity and accordingly calls for the examination to be made easier in keeping with the nature of apprenticeship learning. The second treats a high failure rate as evidence of the profession’s rigour and accordingly rests content with the existing filtering mechanism. Both reactions overlook a fundamental scholarly point: a professional examination is meaningful only when situated in relation to competence standards, preceding training methodology, and the social responsibility of the profession.
Rigour, in itself, does not constitute quality. Leniency, in itself, does not constitute fairness. A rigorous examination lacking a clear competency matrix will generate a sense of uncertainty. An easy examination that permits underqualified persons to enter the profession transfers the risk to clients and to society. The correct standard must lie between those two extremes: an examination must be sufficiently rigorous to protect the profession and the users of legal services, but that rigour must be grounded in a compatible, transparent, and accountable training system.
This article does not treat the 2026 examination as an isolated event, nor does it use the failure rate as a shocking detail. It is treated as a datum enabling deeper identification of the misalignment in lawyer training in Vietnam: legal studies are still commonly organised as a process of receiving legal rules; vocational training is not yet strong enough to convert knowledge into professional competence; traineeship does not always operate as an institution for transmitting professional standards; and the final examination is pushed into a position where it must expose deficiencies that should have been detected and corrected at an earlier stage.
2. Legal Basis and Methodology
The Law on Lawyers defines a lawyer as a person who meets the qualifications and conditions for practising law as prescribed by law and who provides legal services at the request of clients; it further affirms that the professional activities of lawyers contribute to the protection of justice, the freedom and democratic rights of citizens, and the lawful rights and interests of individuals, agencies, and organisations, as well as to socio-economic development and the building of a law-governed State [3]. Even within the legal structure of the profession, a lawyer is not merely a provider of paperwork services, but a participant in safeguarding the legal order through independent professional expertise.
The principles governing the practice of law require a lawyer to comply with the Constitution and laws, to observe professional ethics and conduct rules, to act independently, honestly, and with respect for objective truth, to use lawful measures to best protect the lawful rights and interests of clients, and to bear legal responsibility for his or her professional activities [3]. These requirements demonstrate that the legal profession cannot be defined by purely technical legal knowledge. It demands the capacity for self-restraint, independent resolve, and the ability to bear responsibility for the social consequences of using the law.
Circular 10/2021/TT-BTP, which provides guidance on lawyer traineeship practice, further clarifies the professional character of the traineeship and examination stages. The content of the traineeship examination includes litigation skills, legal advisory skills, out-of-court representation skills and the provision of other legal services, the law on lawyers and the practice of law, the Code of Professional Ethics and Conduct for Vietnamese Lawyers, and other skills acquired during traineeship; the forms of examination include a written examination and a practical examination [4]. Notably, the practical component requires candidates to present and defend their views on a case or matter of their own choosing in which they participated during traineeship, and to answer questions from the members of the Practical Examination Marking Board relating to that case or matter [4].
This legislative design does not treat traineeship and the traineeship examination as formalities. It places emphasis on professional competence—that is, the capacity to apply legal knowledge in situations involving a real case file, a real client, a real dispute, professional ethics, and defined limits of responsibility. If the preceding training process has remained primarily focused on transmitting legal rules, and if traineeship has not generated sufficiently rich professional experience, the examination will be measuring a competence that has not been adequately prepared.
In terms of methodology, this article combines three approaches. The first is normative analysis, aimed at identifying the legal standards that the Law on Lawyers and Circular 10/2021/TT-BTP establish for the legal profession, traineeship, and the traineeship examination. The second is institutional analysis, aimed at examining the relationships among the actors in the training chain: law schools, vocational training institutions, law practice organisations, supervising lawyers, bar associations, the Vietnam Bar Federation, and state management agencies. The third is comparative analysis, not with the aim of transplanting foreign models, but to identify the common principles of professionally oriented legal vocational training systems: not equating the study of law with the practice of law, and always interposing a transitional mechanism between legal knowledge and the right to independent practice.
Building on that methodological foundation, this article does not set out to defend or to criticise the 2026 examination. The examination is treated as a convergence point for prior questions: whether law faculties have produced legal reasoning capacity or merely the capacity to receive legal rules; whether vocational training has transformed learners into persons capable of handling case files or has merely re-systematised knowledge; whether traineeship has formed professional character or has merely completed the conditions for sitting the examination; and whether the examination’s assessment standards are sufficiently transparent to guide adjustments to the training system.
3. Legal Studies and the Legal Profession: The Difference Between Understanding the Law and Being Responsible for the Law
Legal studies, at their deepest level, are not merely the memorisation of statutory provisions. A genuine legal education must help learners understand law as an order of reasoning, authority, values, and limits on power. A law student must understand why a given rule was enacted, what interests it protects, what power it constrains, what opportunity it creates, how it can be abused, and, when it conflicts with another rule, which interpretive method is more persuasive. Yet even when understood in this broad sense, legal studies remain primarily a form of knowledge.
The legal profession belongs to a different plane altogether. A lawyer is not merely required to understand the law; a lawyer must use the law in situations where the truth is often incomplete, evidence is not readily available, the client’s interests do not perfectly align with objective truth, and every professional act carries consequences. A law student can set out the conditions for the validity of a civil transaction. A lawyer must determine, within a specific set of documents, which ground of invalidity can be proved, which ground carries only psychological value, which ground, if raised, will create the risk of a counter-claim, and which ground, though theoretically correct, should not be deployed in the current strategy.
That difference is not simply the difference between theory and practice in the ordinary sense. It is the difference between knowledge and responsibility. A law student can be wrong in an examination and correct the error in a subsequent attempt. A lawyer who errs in a case may cause the client to lose a limitation period, lose the opportunity to gather evidence, lose the ability to negotiate, or be pushed into a less favourable legal position than before consulting the lawyer. Accordingly, professional competence is not simply the competence of knowing correctly; it is the competence of making responsible decisions under conditions of uncertainty.
A legal case file never resembles a textbook. A client does not present facts in the order of legal constituent elements; they present facts according to memory, anxiety, anger, self-interest, and sometimes concealment. An administrative decision does not merely contain the cited legal grounds; it also contains what was left unsaid, the documents not provided, and the responsibility that was evaded. A contract does not merely contain its clauses; it also contains the context of its conclusion, the flow of funds, post-contract conduct, commercial custom, and the relative power of the parties. A lawyer must read both the written portions and the blank spaces of legal life.
From this perspective, a lawyer performs a distinctive intermediary function: converting a social disorder into a manageable legal problem. That conversion demands knowledge, but knowledge is only the first material. A lawyer must also possess the skill to structure facts, evaluate evidence, select procedures, manage client expectations, maintain ethical boundaries, and write in a language that does not display erudition but produces the necessary legal effect. A lawyer’s written work, properly understood, is not a showcase of statutory provisions; it is a means of organising responsibility in response to a specific situation.
Accordingly, lawyer training cannot be understood as a continuation of undergraduate legal education. It must be a process of transformation. A person who knows the law must be trained to become a person capable of bearing responsibility for the use of the law. A person who can cite statutory provisions must be trained to know when to cite them, to what extent, within what strategy, and how to avoid turning the provisions into a tool of unethical pressure. A person who can write grammatically correct legal sentences must be trained to understand that every sentence in a document sent out in a lawyer’s name has the potential to alter the legal position of another person.
4. Law School: The Limits of Rule Transmission and the Methodological Deficit
Legal education in Vietnam over many years appears to have remained heavily influenced by a model of transmitting legal rules. Learners are introduced to fields of law through systems of concepts, conditions, procedures, competences, sanctions, and examination formats requiring relatively direct recall or application. This approach is not without value; a law student cannot progress far without a conceptual foundation and a grounding in substantive law. But when rule transmission becomes the dominant method—indeed, an almost instinctive pedagogy—legal education stalls at the level of information and weakens the capacity for legal reasoning.
Legal reasoning is not formed by memorising more statutory provisions, but by placing those provisions within a structure of argument. A regulation on land recovery is not merely a provision about competence and procedure. It carries within it the relationship between public power and property rights, between public interest and distributive justice, between development policy and the obligation to compensate, between the State’s power of compulsion and the affected person’s right to an explanation. A provision on defence in criminal litigation is not merely a right for a lawyer to participate. It is a mechanism for restraining the risk that prosecutorial power will exceed the bounds of the law.
A law class that does not train learners to perceive those relationships will produce people who can recite rules but do not understand their depth. When they enter the profession, they are liable to handle cases as an exercise in finding the applicable provision. But a real case does not announce to the lawyer where the legal question lies. The lawyer must independently identify the central issue, independently question the way the client has framed the dispute, and independently discover that a matter presented as a contractual dispute may in substance concern agency, evidence of payment, the validity of an agreement, or the risk of criminalising a commercial relationship.
Modern legal education cannot lack foundational competencies such as reading judgments, analysing case files, legal writing, academic argument, and the critical evaluation of reasoning. Reading a judgment is not about knowing who won and who lost; it is about understanding how the court determined the facts, how it assessed the evidence, which grounds it selected, which arguments it disregarded, and why an apparently correct argument was not accepted. Analysing a case file is not about reading each document in sequence, but about constructing a map of the case: which facts are established, which facts still lack supporting evidence, where the other side can respond, by what reasons the deciding authority may avoid an issue, and which procedural options remain effective.
Ideals such as the rule of law, human rights, constitutional justice, or the control of power have educational significance only when incorporated into a teaching method capable of producing independent legal subjects. If those concepts are transmitted through monologue, note-taking, and recall, they become a layer of progressive vocabulary overlaid on an old method. Learners may speak of the rule of law without having been trained in the habit of challenging power through reasoning; they may speak of human rights without having learned how to convert a specific violation into a legal claim; they may speak of justice without having been required to defend a position before serious scrutiny.
The methodological deficit at the undergraduate level does not merely impoverish academic capacity. It creates weak inputs for lawyer vocational training. Learners enter the vocational training stage with the habit of seeking answers in legislative texts, whereas the legal profession demands the habit of asking questions, constructing frameworks, weighing risks, and taking responsibility for choices. When the methodological foundation is weak, vocational training must redo work that the university has neglected; if vocational training also continues to teach through the systematisation of rules, the deficit will carry over into traineeship and ultimately manifest itself in the examination.
5. Lawyer Vocational Training: From the Classroom to the Case File, From the Lecture to the Professional Work Product
Lawyer vocational training ought to be the stage at which learners are taken out of the safety of pre-packaged knowledge. At this stage, they do not need another cycle of studying legal institutions in a different form. They need to be placed in professional circumstances: a specific client, an incomplete file, a legal claim not yet defined, an approaching procedural risk, an ethical boundary that may be crossed if the lawyer simply defers to the client’s wishes.
Circular 10/2021/TT-BTP has clearly identified the content of the traineeship examination as including professional practice skills, not merely the law on lawyers and professional ethics [4]. This very provision shows that the applicable legal standard does not treat professional competence as an appendage to knowledge. What is examined is the capacity to participate in litigation, to advise, to represent outside litigation, and to provide other legal services within the framework of professional ethics. If the vocational training institution does not organise its programme around those competencies, the programme will be incompatible with the very assessment standard that learners will face.
The basic unit of lawyer vocational training must be the case file. A case file compels learners to engage with the real life of the law: incomplete documents, mixed evidence, a client’s account that contains both truth and self-protection, an initial request that may miss the point, and procedural choices that always carry consequences. A person who has only studied the rules on filing a claim will have difficulty understanding why, in a specific case, sending an additional letter requesting the provision of documents is more important than hastily filing a complaint. A person who has only studied template forms will have difficulty understanding why two statements of claim that are both formally correct may differ in that one opens a framework for proving a case while the other places the client in a passive position.
A civil litigation subject, if it is to have professional quality, must require learners to make decisions based on a set of case documents: correctly identifying the defendant, deciding whether to join persons with related rights and obligations, deciding which claims to maintain and which to drop, determining which evidence must be gathered first, assessing whether an interim injunction is needed, identifying where the risk of a counterclaim lies, and determining at what point mediation would not weaken the litigation position. An administrative law subject must require learners to read an administrative decision as a structure of power: which grounds were stated, which grounds were omitted, which documents were not provided, what legal significance the public authority’s silence carries, and which burden of proof falls on the respondent.
Professional skills must also be assessed through professional work product. A good lecture is not sufficient. A template document is not sufficient. Learners must write legal opinions, statements of claim, response letters, written submissions, witness examination outlines, risk reports, and negotiation proposals; those products must then be read against professional standards. Those standards ask not only whether the law was cited correctly, but whether the focus was correct, whether the language created the necessary legal obligations, whether the level of forcefulness was appropriate, whether weaknesses were identified, and whether the document exposed the client to risk.
Professional ethics in lawyer training cannot be placed at the end of the programme as a set of rules to be memorised. Every professional skill of a lawyer carries ethical content. Drafting a formal complaint is not merely a technique for presenting facts; it is a decision to place another person at risk of criminal sanction. Drafting a demand letter is not merely the skill of applying pressure; it is the boundary between protecting a client’s interests and abusing a lawyer’s standing. Advising a client is not merely answering a question about the applicable rule; it is managing the expectations of a person who has come to the lawyer with hope, fear, and sometimes anger.
Lawyer vocational training only begins to have meaning when learners feel the weight of the work product they create. A document written in class should not be treated as an assignment to be submitted, but as a simulation of a professional act that may affect the rights of another person. When learners have not yet felt that weight, they remain outside the profession, even if they have completed many subjects covering professional skills.
6. Traineeship: The Institution for Transmitting Professional Character
Lawyer traineeship is not a procedural extension of vocational training. It is the stage at which a law student begins to leave the world of pre-presented knowledge and enter the world of professional responsibility—a world where the law no longer appears as rules lying dormant in a textbook, but emerges in the circumstances of human lives, in conflicting interests, in incomplete case files, in the imperfect accounts of clients, and in choices that can produce real consequences. It is precisely at this stage that the trainee must learn what a law school finds difficult to fully convey: the difference between knowing the law and being responsible for the use of the law.
The value of traineeship does not lie in the time completed, nor in formal presence at a law practice organisation. That value lies in whether the trainee is placed within the living discipline of the profession: the discipline of reading a case file to its end, the discipline of questioning an account without offending the person giving it, the discipline of selecting grounds without concealing weaknesses, the discipline of writing a document in which every sentence must serve a purpose, the discipline of protecting a client without losing sight of objective truth, the discipline of receiving remuneration without compromising professional integrity. Those disciplines cannot be formed through lectures, and still less can they be confirmed merely by a traineeship report. They are formed in a serious professional relationship between those who have gone before and those who follow, between experience and inexperience, between the right to learn a trade and the obligation to mature.
Genuine traineeship is a form of education through the presence of the profession. The trainee does not only learn what a lawyer does, but learns how a lawyer thinks before acting. Watching an experienced lawyer read a case file means watching the profession distinguish what matters from what is merely noise. Watching a lawyer revise a document means seeing the difference between language that appears forceful and language that has legal value. Watching a lawyer converse with a client means seeing how the profession listens to a person without being swept along by their emotions. Watching a lawyer decline an inappropriate instruction means watching professional ethics operate not as a declaration, but as an internal limit.
When traineeship is reduced to a formality, the legal profession loses one of its most important mechanisms of self-protection. The supervising lawyer is no longer a person who transmits the profession’s way of thinking, its way of deliberating, its way of self-restraint and bearing responsibility, but is pushed into the role of one who certifies that a process has satisfied the formal requirements on paper. The law practice organisation is no longer a space in which the trainee learns to perceive the living reality of the law in each case file, but becomes merely an administrative address for legitimating a compulsory stage. That decline is not dramatic, but its consequences run deep: the legal profession may continue to produce persons meeting the conditions for sitting the examination, but it is less certain to produce enough persons who carry within themselves the caution, resolve, and self-respect required of someone whom society has permitted to intervene in the rights and lives of others.
Circular 10/2021/TT-BTP has established rules on traineeship registration, the duration of traineeship, supervising lawyers, the traineeship diary, traineeship progress reports, and the conditions for sitting the examination [4]. These provisions create a necessary legal framework, but a legal framework only has meaning when filled with professional substance. The traineeship diary should not merely record activities performed; it must reflect which skills the trainee has learned, which types of case files the trainee has participated in handling, what work products have been created, how errors have been corrected, where progress has been made, and what gaps remain before the trainee is confirmed as qualified to sit the examination.
The responsibility of the supervising lawyer must therefore be understood as extending beyond administrative responsibility. It is the responsibility of transmitting standards. The supervisor does not merely assign tasks, but must open to the trainee the way in which a mature lawyer balances the client’s interests against the limits of the law, between forcefulness and caution, between winning a particular matter and the risk of damaging professional integrity. Not every skilled lawyer is automatically a good supervisor. Supervising a traineeship demands a different quality: the ability to transform personal experience into professional lessons for those who follow.
Genuine traineeship must be the place where a law student begins to understand that a lawyer practises not only through knowledge, but through a form of professional character. That character is built from skills, but is not identical to skills; it is supported by experience, but is not experience alone; it is governed by ethical rules, but cannot exist merely as a catalogue of prohibitions. It is the capacity to stand between the client’s demands, the limits of the law, the uncertainty of evidence, and the dignity of the profession, and to arrive at a choice capable of protecting both the specific interest at stake and the integrity of the practitioner.
7. Comparative Experience: The Intermediate Mechanism Between Legal Study and Independent Practice
No system of lawyer training can be transplanted wholesale from one country to another. Legal traditions, the role of courts, the structure of the legal services market, university design, and the position of professional organisations all differ. But serious systems commonly converge on one point: a person who has studied law is not to be taken as already ready for independent practice. Between legal knowledge and the right to practise independently, there must be an intermediate mechanism in which the learner is trained, supervised, assessed, and required to demonstrate competence against professional standards.
In England and Wales, the pathway to qualification as a solicitor under the Solicitors Qualifying Examination requires candidates to complete at least two years of qualifying work experience, whether full-time or its equivalent [5]. This mechanism is not merely a time requirement; it must create the opportunity for the learner to develop the competencies necessary to practise as a solicitor. For barristers, pupillage is described by the Bar Standards Board as the work-based learning component of Bar training [6]. This structure demonstrates that supervised practical experience is not decorative in legal education, but constitutes a decisive stage in the formation of professional competence.
In Germany, following the university stage and the first state examination, the learner enters the Rechtsreferendariat, commonly understood as a period of legal practical training lasting approximately two years before the second state examination [7]. In Japan, a person wishing to enter the legal profession must in principle complete a professional law school, pass the national judicial examination, and complete a one-year training course for legal apprentices at the Legal Training and Research Institute of the Supreme Court [8]. In France, avocat is a regulated profession accessed through vocational training at regional centres and the award of the CAPA certificate; official sources of the Conseil national des barreaux emphasise the role of lawyer training schools and certification of professional competence prior to entry into the profession [9].
These models differ technically, but share a common acknowledgment: studying law is not sufficient to practise law. Learners must pass through a stage placed under professional discipline, in which knowledge is tested through situations, skills are produced through work product, and professional ethics are formed in concrete choices. Supervised practice is the means by which professions with social responsibility protect the community from the risk of newly admitted practitioners exercising professional authority before they are sufficiently mature.
The lesson for Vietnam does not lie in the names of foreign models. Vietnam already has vocational training, traineeship, and a traineeship examination. The issue lies in the degree of substantive quality of those institutions. Is vocational training genuinely vocational training, or is it still the re-teaching of law? Is traineeship genuinely supervised practice, or merely time spent fulfilling a formal condition? Does the examination genuinely measure professional competence, or is its assessment matrix still insufficiently transparent? Those questions matter more than debating whether Vietnam should resemble Germany, Japan, England, or France.
A further lesson from comparative systems is that a high standard has legitimacy only when accompanied by a corresponding training method. A high standard without clarity generates confusion. A high standard without training to match generates injustice. A high standard without data feedback merely increases individual pressure on learners. A high standard, if designed with a serious professional philosophy, must simultaneously draw law schools, vocational training institutions, law practice organisations, supervising lawyers, and professional self-regulatory bodies into shared responsibility.
8. Youth, Intelligence, and Professional Maturity
One of the difficult questions in lawyer training concerns the relationship between age, intelligence, and professional maturity. Young people can be intelligent, quick, pure in their motivations, and rich in professional energy. The legal profession needs young people, because without a new generation the profession becomes closed, self-satisfied, and repetitive of old habits. But intelligence and enthusiasm do not by themselves guarantee the capacity to practise responsibly.
At a very young age, a person may quickly learn a statutory provision, quickly understand the structure of a legal institution, write a clear analytical paragraph, and respond flexibly to questions. But the legal profession demands the capacity to slow down before the complexity of life. A lawyer must know how to listen to an angry client without turning that anger into a strategy; know how to recognise what the client has not said; know how to see the risk lurking behind an ostensibly legitimate request; know how to distinguish the strength of an argument from the haste of its expression; and know that a procedural win may damage the client’s long-term position.
Professional maturity is not outward sophistication. It is the capacity for self-control when entrusted with the power to affect the interests of others. A lawyer newly entering the profession typically wants to demonstrate competence through forcefulness, but the profession teaches that not every forceful sentence has legal value. A young lawyer is easily inclined to believe that identifying a wrong is sufficient to prevail, but the profession teaches that between what is wrong in life and what is wrong in a demonstrable procedural sense lies a very great distance. A young lawyer may believe that protecting a client means deferring to the client’s expectations, but the profession teaches that a lawyer protects clients by bringing them back within the limits of the law, not by legitimating every desire they hold.
The question of youth should therefore not be turned into prejudice. The issue is not whether a twenty-two-year-old may enter the profession. The issue is the mechanism through which they enter, the scope of authority they are given, the manner in which they are supervised, the work product through which they must demonstrate competence, the persons who correct their errors, and the ethical standards within which they are placed. A sound system does not exclude young people from the profession; it provides them with a path toward professional maturity, in which inexperience is neither concealed by a certificate of confirmation nor punished by an examination for which they have not been commensurately prepared.
In many legal systems, a person newly entering the profession may participate in case files, work in a law office, and learn the trade through practice, but the right to independent practice is typically made available after stages of training, practice, and assessment. This reflects a fundamental understanding: a lawyer needs not only to know the law, but to be formed within an order of responsibility. Without that order, intelligence may become recklessness, enthusiasm may become risk, and self-confidence may conceal gaps in judgment.
9. The Vietnamese Context: An Environment of Uncertainty That Demands Higher Practice Competence
Lawyer training in Vietnam cannot be designed as though practitioners will be entering a stable, transparent, data-rich legal environment with a strong culture of accountability. In many fields—particularly land law, administrative law, investment, corporate law, construction, economic criminal law, matrimonial matters involving substantial assets, inheritance, and compensation—case files are commonly not clean. Data may be missing. Documents from different periods may conflict. State agencies may be silent or may provide incomplete materials. A single matter may simultaneously involve civil, administrative, criminal, policy, and local-interest dimensions.
In that environment, a lawyer cannot merely be a person who looks up and cites provisions. A lawyer must be able to read the structure of a case: the client’s real interests, the balance of power among the parties, the possibility of accessing evidence, the reliability of documents, the disposition of the deciding authority, the opposing party’s interests, the timing of action, and the limits of each available legal pathway. A land law case does not merely involve an area of land, a certificate of title, and a history of use. It involves a history of management, policies across successive periods, cadastral records, the responsibility of local authorities, the possibility of silence by public authorities, and the disparity between an ordinary citizen and the administrative apparatus.
The greater the environment of uncertainty, the more practice-oriented lawyer training must be. Learners must be exposed to imperfect case files, because reality is never perfect. They must learn how to develop approaches when documents are incomplete, how to request the provision of files, how to bring a claim against administrative silence, how to preserve or introduce evidence at the right moment, how to restrain a client from exceeding legal limits, how to recognise that some matters are morally right but lack sufficient legal grounds, that some matters have legal grounds but no practical effect, and that some matters win a battle but lose the overall strategy.
A weak lawyer in a stable legal environment may cause harm within a certain scope. A weak lawyer in an environment of uncertainty may cause a client to lose their last opportunity to protect themselves. Such a lawyer may select the wrong legal relationship, miss a limitation period, send documents to the wrong authority, submit evidence at the wrong time, file a denunciation without sufficient grounds, commence litigation without correctly identifying the subject matter, or write documents that appear forceful but create no legal obligation on the recipient. These are no longer minor technical errors. They constitute a failure of the function of protecting rights.
The legal profession in Vietnam therefore needs higher, not lower, training standards. People come to a lawyer not to hear repeated the statutory provisions they could look up themselves. They need someone to help them understand where they stand within a complex legal structure. Businesses need lawyers not to decorate contracts with legal terminology, but to identify risks before they become disputes. A person charged with a criminal offence needs a lawyer not to complete the procedural formality of having defence counsel present, but to prevent prosecutorial power from exceeding the limits of the law.
Lawyer training, in this sense, is a component of rule-of-law capacity. A society may enact many laws and yet remain weak in the rule of law if those entrusted with the function of protecting the rights of citizens lack the professional competence to do so. A weak lawyer makes rights fragile. A strong lawyer, in the proper sense of that term, does not make disputes more acrimonious; they place disputes within the order of reasoning, evidence, procedure, and ethical limits.
10. A Rigorous Examination and the Conditions That Legitimate Rigour
A rigorous professional examination is necessary. There is no academic or social justification for lowering the standard for the legal profession simply because learners find it difficult. The practice of law is not an honorary credential; it is the right to practise in a field that can directly affect the interests of others. Society is entitled to require that a person granted the right to practise demonstrate minimum competence.
However, rigour has legitimacy only when accompanied by transparent standards. Candidates must know against which competencies they are being assessed. Vocational training institutions must know what standard learners are required to reach. Supervising lawyers must know in which areas they must train their trainees. Bar associations and the Vietnam Bar Federation must have data to feed back into adjustments to traineeship and training activities. An examination that merely announces pass or fail may perform a sorting function, but is not yet sufficient to drive reform.
Circular 10/2021/TT-BTP establishes that the principle of examination is rigorous, public, fair, objective, honest, and effective, and identifies the skill groups constituting the examination content [4]. Those principles must be elaborated into a competency matrix: identifying legal issues, analysing facts, selecting grounds, handling evidence, selecting procedures, legal writing, oral presentation, advising clients, presenting and defending a position, identifying ethical risks, and managing risk. When the matrix is not sufficiently clear, learners are liable to revert to learning templates; when the matrix is sufficiently clear, the entire training system is compelled to shift from teaching content to developing competence.
A good skills examination paper should not reward candidates who cite many statutory provisions but cannot identify the central issue. It must require candidates to process facts containing a reasonable degree of complexity, select the issues worth addressing, set aside distracting details, identify weaknesses in the case file, and write out a course of action that can be professionally defended. The practical component should also not merely assess fluency. It must assess the capacity to defend a position under challenge, the capacity to acknowledge the limits of an argument, and the capacity to maintain ethical standards when placed in a difficult situation.
The data from the examination must be published and analysed at a level sufficient to inform training policy. If many candidates fail the skills component, it is necessary to know in which skills they are weak. If weakness lies in reading case files, the fault lies with both the university and the vocational training institution. If weakness lies in legal writing, the programme must increase the volume of work product subject to critical review. If weakness lies in applying ethics to specific situations, the way ethics is taught must move away from rote learning. If weakness lies in case experience, the traineeship mechanism must be reviewed. A rigorous examination should not end with a score; it must initiate a feedback cycle for the entire system.
11. Reform Proposals: From Training Programme to Professional Ecosystem
Reform of lawyer training cannot begin with the slogan of raising quality. It must begin by redefining the expected output. If the expected output is understood to be a person who knows the law, the programme will continue to revolve around legislative texts. If the expected output is understood to be a person capable of responsible practice, the entire training structure must change: from the way of teaching, the way of learning, the way of conducting traineeship, the way of examining, to the way in which the legal profession self-regulates its own quality.
At the university level, the focus must shift from transmitting legal rules to training in legal methodology. This does not mean reducing the weight given to substantive law. Substantive law remains the foundation, but must be taught in relation to judgments, case files, arguments, policy, and the values it protects. Students must be taught legal reasoning, legal writing, case analysis, file reading, preliminary advising, academic argument, and the critical evaluation of administrative decisions or judicial rulings. A good programme must lead students to understand that knowing the law is only the starting point of legal reasoning.
At the vocational training stage, the programme must be organised around case files and professional work product. Each subject must require learners to produce work that can be assessed against professional standards: legal opinions, statements of claim, written submissions, witness examination outlines, response letters, risk reports, and negotiation proposals. Lecturers must act as professional reviewers, not merely as transmitters of knowledge. Grades should not only reflect accurate citation of the law, but must reflect the capacity to select the central issue, structure an argument, manage risk, produce professional language, and observe professional ethics.
At the traineeship stage, it is necessary to move from managing paperwork to controlling the quality of professional experience. The traineeship diary must record skills and work products, not merely activities. Supervising lawyers must provide periodic assessments of the trainee’s competence. Bar associations need a mechanism for random or thematic review of traineeship activities, particularly at practice organisations that take on many trainees. The confirmation of completion of traineeship must be treated as a professionally responsible act, not an administrative signature.
At the examination stage, a professional competency matrix must be published and applied. This matrix must specify the minimum level that a trainee lawyer is required to reach in each competency: factual analysis, issue identification, selection of grounds, handling of evidence, selection of procedures, legal writing, oral presentation, client advising, professional ethics, and risk management. When standards are made public, training, traineeship, and preparation activities will be compelled to align with the competency standards rather than with the format of past examination papers.
Deeper reform lies in professional culture. The legal profession cannot take pride in its tradition of independence if it does not accept responsibility for the quality of the next generation. A law firm that takes on trainees without training them is consuming the future of the profession. A supervising lawyer who signs a confirmation without genuinely supervising is weakening professional standards. A vocational training institution that re-teaches legal rules instead of developing professional competence is failing in its function. An examination that merely sorts without generating data for reform has not fulfilled its policy responsibility.
12. Conclusion
The results of the first sitting of the 2026 lawyer traineeship examination present an uncomfortable datum: after many years of legal study, vocational training, and traineeship, a large proportion of candidates have still not demonstrated minimum professional competence in the skills component. This datum does not permit the hasty conclusion that the examination was too difficult, nor does it justify self-satisfaction that the legal profession is rigorous simply because the failure rate is high. Its true significance lies in compelling the lawyer training system to examine the relationship between professional standards and the methods used to produce practitioners.
A lawyer is not a person who has memorised many statutory provisions. A lawyer is a person whom society has entrusted with the power to use the law to protect the interests of others in situations that are frequently uncertain, conflicted, and fraught with risk. That power demands knowledge, but does not stop at knowledge; it demands skills, but does not stop at skills; it demands resolve, ethics, self-restraint, and the capacity to bear responsibility for the consequences of every professional choice.
Lawyer training in Vietnam must therefore break free from the model of memorising legal rules. Law schools must cultivate legal reasoning. Vocational training must develop the competence to handle case files. Traineeship must become a process of transmitting professional standards. The examination must genuinely measure professional competence and generate feedback data for reform. The legal profession must regard the training of the next generation as part of its self-regulatory responsibility, not as a peripheral task alongside the provision of legal services.
A system governed by the rule of law does not only need correct laws. It needs people with the capacity to make rights genuinely protected in practice. A lawyer, in the most serious sense, is one such person. If lawyer training does not produce people of sufficient competence, sufficient caution, and sufficient integrity to bear that responsibility, the weakness does not stop at a single examination or a single generation of learners. It becomes a decline in the very capacity to protect justice in legal life.
Notes
[1] Vietnam Bar Federation, “NOTICE on Examination Results of the KQTSHNLS Examination Sitting No. 1.2026”, published on 22/06/2026; the post was accompanied by score sheets for the northern and southern regions.
[2] The figures cited in this article are used as data for policy analysis, compiled from the score sheets publicly published with the notice of the Vietnam Bar Federation. When used in a formal academic article, a supplementary calculation annex or re-verification from the original score file should be included to ensure verifiability.
[3] Law on Lawyers No. 65/2006/QH11, as amended and supplemented by Law No. 20/2012/QH13 and related instruments; see the provisions on social functions, legal services, and the principles of practising as a lawyer.
[4] Circular No. 10/2021/TT-BTP dated 10/12/2021 of the Ministry of Justice providing guidance on lawyer traineeship practice, in particular Articles 15, 16, 17, 18 and the provisions on the responsibilities of law practice organisations, bar associations, and the Vietnam Bar Federation.
[5] Solicitors Regulation Authority, “Qualifying work experience”, updated 26/01/2024.
[6] Bar Standards Board, “Pupillage / work-based learning component of Bar training”, updated 11/11/2025.
[7] FernUniversität in Hagen, “Law (First Legal Examination)”, describing the path continuing to the second state examination following the Referendariat; reference should also be made to the official sources of the individual German Länder, given the federal structure’s influence on legal education.
[8] Supreme Court of Japan, “The Legal Training and Research Institute of Japan”; Japan Federation of Bar Associations, “The Japanese Attorney System”.
[9] Conseil national des barreaux, “Toutes les conditions d’accès à la profession” and “Présentation du parcours de formation”; European e-Justice Portal, “Initial training of lawyers in the European Union - France”.
[10] American Bar Association, “Bar Exams” and “Bar Admissions”; National Conference of Bar Examiners, “Comprehensive Guide to Bar Admission Requirements”.
[11] William M. Sullivan, Anne Colby, Judith Welch Wegner, Lloyd Bond & Lee S. Shulman, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching/Jossey-Bass, 2007.
[12] American Bar Association, Legal Education and Professional Development - An Educational Continuum: Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap, 1992 (commonly referred to as the MacCrate Report).
Research Materials and Reference Sources
Vietnam Bar Federation. (2026). NOTICE on Examination Results of the KQTSHNLS Examination Sitting No. 1.2026. Published 22/06/2026, accompanied by score sheets for the northern and southern regions.
Ministry of Justice. (2021). Circular No. 10/2021/TT-BTP dated 10/12/2021 providing guidance on lawyer traineeship practice. Official Electronic Gazette of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
National Assembly. (2006, amended 2012). Law on Lawyers No. 65/2006/QH11; Law No. 20/2012/QH13 amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Law on Lawyers.
Vietnam Bar Federation. Code of Professional Ethics and Conduct for Vietnamese Lawyers.
Solicitors Regulation Authority. (2024). Qualifying work experience. London: SRA.
Bar Standards Board. (2025). Pupillage / work-based learning component of Bar training. London: BSB.
FernUniversität in Hagen. Law (First Legal Examination): information on German legal education and Referendariat path.
Supreme Court of Japan. The Legal Training and Research Institute of Japan: Training of Legal Apprentices.
Japan Federation of Bar Associations. The Japanese Attorney System.
Conseil national des barreaux. Toutes les conditions d’accès à la profession; Présentation du parcours de formation.
European e-Justice Portal. Initial training of lawyers in the European Union: France.
American Bar Association. Bar Admissions; Bar Exams; Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.
National Conference of Bar Examiners. Comprehensive Guide to Bar Admission Requirements.
Sullivan, W. M., Colby, A., Wegner, J. W., Bond, L., & Shulman, L. S. (2007). Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
American Bar Association. (1992). Legal Education and Professional Development - An Educational Continuum: Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap (MacCrate Report).
Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.
Kronman, A. T. (1993). The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Luban, D. (2007). Legal Ethics and Human Dignity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Menkel-Meadow, C. (1994). The trouble with the adversary system in a postmodern, multicultural world. William & Mary Law Review, 38, 5–44.