What Finance and Law Students Need to Know about Civil Effect

Duisenberg school of finance a Master programme with a Finance and Law track. If you wish to perform in a ‘toga-profession’ in the Netherlands, you will need to meet the requirements to obtain ‘Civil Effect’. The civil effect is the right to start training to become a practicing lawyer, a public prosecutor, or a judge in the Netherlands.

Do I need civil effect?
Civil effect gives you access to the regulated legal professions, notably the professions of a practicing lawyer (‘advocaat’ in Dutch), judge, or prosecutor in the Netherlands. You can become an advocaat if you work and train in a Dutch law firm for three years.

You do not need civil effect, or be an advocaat, in order to do legal work or to give legal advice. If you want to pursue a career which requires you to have a university degree, but not necessarily a law degree, then civil effect is not strictly necessary either. For example, you may then even combine your Bachelor’s degree in law with a Master’s degree in another discipline, like economics, arts and culture, etc. In other words, you do not need to practice law simply because you have a Bachelor’s degree in law.

How to obtain civil effect?
Civil effect means that your Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes were developed as such that you satisfy the requirements to be appointed to the Dutch bar and/or the judiciary. In other words, it gives you the right to start training to become a practicing lawyer (advocaat), a public prosecutor, or a judge in the Netherlands. According to the law, members of the bar* and the judiciary** are admissible, if they have completed both a Bachelor’s and Master’s programme in law at a public Dutch university.

In addition to this, various orders in council specify the courses for each professional group that should be passed in these programmes***.

An individual review is necessary to find out to what extent your education meets the requirements for civil effect and which courses are still missing. This review can be done at any of the public Dutch universities. In addition, any combination of multiple country studies (EU-ba + NL-ma or NL-ba + EU-ma) has to be taken to the ‘General Board’ of the Dutch ‘orde van advocaten’ for evaluation before any notification of civil effect will be given. Please be aware that DSF is not able to facilitate in these processes.

To obtain civil effect, fluent knowledge of the Dutch language is necessary.

How do I choose?
It all depends on what you want to do after you graduate. To enter into broader, not specifically legal careers, you may graduate without civil effect. You should go for Dutch civil effect if:

• you know for certain that you wish to become a practicing lawyer in the Netherlands;
• you know for certain that you wish to train to become a qualified lawyer in a country that requires you to have Dutch civil effect first;
• you do not know yet but want to keep all options open.

What about other countries?
You might want to train to become a qualified lawyer in another country. Note that many countries have a very restricted labour market for legal advice. For instance, even for in-house legal consultancy, you may need to be a trained lawyer. It is strongly recommended to check the requirements of the country where you may want to practice law, since rules vary per country. 

Once you are a Dutch advocaat, you may, as an EU citizen, establish yourself freely under that title in any EU country (European Directive 98/5). In addition, you can obtain the lawyer’s title of your host country (like ‘Rechtsanwalt’ in Germany or ‘avocat’ in France). For that, you can either pass an exam in the law of that country, the so-called aptitude test (European Directive 2005/36), or simply practice the law of that country for three years (Article 10 of European Directive 98/5). The labour market for legal services in the Netherlands is relatively liberal. 


* Article 2 of the Advocatenwet.
** Article 1d of the Wet rechtspositie rechterlijke ambtenaren.
*** Article 1 of the Besluit beroepsvereisten advocatuur; Article 38b, paragraphs 2 and 3, and Article 38c, paragraphs 2 and 3 of the Besluit rechtspositie rechterlijke ambtenaren; Article 21a, paragraph 2 of the Besluit opleiding rechterlijke ambtenaren; Article 1 of the Besluit beroepsvereisten Raad van State.