Where to study

Tests

Driving testsCitizenship testsSchool and university admissionsNursing, medicine and healthEnglish and French testsTeachingMoney, law and insuranceTrades and work certification and licensesPilots, drones, boats and radio

Countries

United StatesCanadaUnited KingdomAustraliaNew Zealand

Canada · Accreditation exams

NCA Professional Responsibility

Canadian Professional Responsibility is one of the five subjects the National Committee on Accreditation (NCA) generally assigns to all applicants. The current NCA Professional Responsibility outline, revised for March 2023, covers lawyers’ ethics and regulation in Canada, studied from one casebook and the Federation of Law Societies of Canada’s Model Code of Professional Conduct. The whole mark comes from one open-book written exam.

  • 100%Of the mark from the open-book exam
  • March 2023Version of the current outline
  • 4th editionCasebook edition the outline sets
Where to study

Updated October 2026 · Written from official sources, listed at the bottom of this page

What does the NCA Professional Responsibility exam cover?

The outline has four parts:

  • The legal profession: professions and professionalism, and how lawyers and the profession are regulated.
  • Ethics, lawyering and regulation: the lawyer-client relationship, keeping client confidences, conflicts of interest, and the adversary system and lawyers as advocates.
  • Specific practice areas: counselling and negotiation, criminal law practice, government lawyers and lawyers in organizations.
  • Access to justice.

Each topic lists issues to consider and required readings, with optional extras that aren’t needed for the exam.

The casebook and the Model Code

The course is self-taught from two sources. The casebook is Alice Woolley, Richard Devlin and Brent Cotter, Lawyers’ Ethics and Professional Regulation, 4th edition (LexisNexis, 2021). The second is the Model Code of Professional Conduct, where the outline asks you to read both the rules and the commentaries and to know the table of contents well enough to find the provisions that fit a problem.

Lawyers are regulated mainly by each province, and the codes differ, so the outline uses the Model Code as its main guide. You aren’t expected to read every province’s rules. The outline expects you to get to know your own province’s rules once you’ve passed.

NCA: Canadian Professional Responsibility syllabus (PDF) ↗NCA: Professional Responsibility sample exam (PDF) ↗

Who has to take it

Graduates from common law, mixed and other legal systems all have it among the five mandatory Canadian subjects. Canadian civil law graduates usually need it too, unless they completed it during their civil law education. You can meet it by NCA exam or by an approved course in a Canadian common law program.

NCA law exams and the subjects you can be assigned →Which 2027 sessions offer it →

Professional Responsibility under the new framework

The NCA’s modernized assessment framework, phased in from 2027, includes an exam called Ethics and Professional Responsibility in Canadian Legal Practice. The NCA’s table doesn’t say which current subjects it covers.

The new NCA exams from 2027 →
Sources: NCA and 3 more. Checked October 2026.

Rules and fees can change, so check the official site before your test.

Explore

Everything else, in one place

OverviewCoursesAssessmentSubjectsSyllabiSchedulePortalCertificate

Study materials

Sample examsNotesProf. Responsibility