Tips for the article 100 exam

If you are a solicitor in England & Wales and want to qualify as a lawyer in France, you generally don't need to follow the traditional route in France (the CRFPA exam, 18 months of bar school and the CAPA exam). Instead, you can typically take the exam outlined in article 100 of Decree no. 91-1197 of 27 November 1991 organising the legal profession (known as the article 100 exam). This is the exam I took after passing the New York bar (the process is the same whether you come from the UK or the US).

After an initial article on practical information, I would like to share a few tips with you.

This exam is not a formality

Before taking this exam, I often heard that it was just a formality (mostly from people who had taken the traditional CRFPA route). This is not the case at all! If I have just one piece of advice to give you, it’s not to underestimate this exam. It requires serious preparation, even if you are French and have studied law in France. The content is quite substantial, especially for the procedure exam, which includes civil, administrative, and criminal procedure, as well as the organisation of the French legal system.

If you already work as a lawyer, it’s highly likely that you won’t be able to devote yourself full-time to studying for several weeks, which will make preparation more difficult.

There are also no past exams available (unlike the CRFPA), and generally speaking, there is little information about the exam itself. When I took it, I felt that I didn’t know exactly what to expect. That’s where the advantage of a prep course comes in—you will have all the course materials at your disposal, as well as opportunities to practise. However, it’s not essential; it’s perfectly possible to study on your own, but you’ll need to do more preparation beforehand since you’ll have to create your own revision materials.

Codes are allowed during the exams, so I advise you to study and learn how to work with them. If you studied in a common law country, you might not be used to this. Doing some real preparation work beforehand (you can highlight and add post-it notes to the codes, but they must not be handwritten) can help you significantly during the exams.

Finally, I recommend that you review the method carefully, especially for the civil submissions exam, and practice writing these, as they are very different from what you would find in England. There are many formalities to be aware of. This exam is not done on a computer, so you will have to write the submissions by hand.

We hope this article helped you! If you have further questions on this topic, do not hesitate to send a message to frenchlegalprofessionals@gmail.com.

Article by Victoria Plisson

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