What would you do if you had to draw up a plan for training 1.4 million legal personnel in European Union law in 27 member states? You would either run for the exit, or make a hopeful start somewhere. The European Commission made its start this week by publishing a communication on legal training, called Building trust in EU-wide justice - a new dimension to European Judicial Training. And don’t be put off by the term ‘judicial’: in Euro-speak, it goes wider than judges, and includes lawyers, too. Since the document requires a PhD in Euro-speak to decode, I will be your guide.

The first important issue it settles is that judicial training covers lawyers, as mentioned above. This is a long-running saga. The Commission pours millions into training in EU law. Between 2007 and 2010, the amount was €35.5m through funding or co-funding, covering between 4,000 and 9,000 people per year, mainly judges and prosecutors. Judges and prosecutors make up less than 10% of the professionals who should be trained, but are easier to reach because they are, in one form or another, state employees, and their training is free to them (since either the EU or their employer pays).

Where training covers lawyers, the money has rarely, if ever, been given on a 100% basis, leading to an inbuilt financial bias against lawyer training. It was not clear whether the Lisbon Treaty provisions dealing with this matter (articles 81 and 82) included lawyers at all. Now the communication makes clear that, from the Commission’s point of view, lawyers are in.

The Commission is keen to include us because we are the first port-of-call for EU citizens needing to implement their rights. The Commission aims in its communication to reach 20,000 legal practitioners per year by 2020 - which should in time include you.

The second important issue is that there will be no single European training institution. There had been lobbying back and forward, and the Commission has decided to build on what exists. A number of national bars run very successful training programmes for their members, and institutions like the European Academy of Law (ERA, which trained 1,303 legal professionals in 2010) and the European Centre for Judges and Lawyers at the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA) also train lawyers.

The Commission estimates that there are around 1.4 million legal practitioners - including judges and court staff - in the EU. Given that a distinguished, centralised body like ERA managed to train less than 0.1% of them in a particular year, it is not surprising that the Commission goes for the subsidiarity principle, and builds on the extensive network that also exists at national level. It states that its criteria in future funding is to fund large-scale projects with large target audiences. Otherwise, the money will seem to go nowhere.

The problems faced by the Commission are huge and twofold. On the one hand, there is the large number of legal practitioners to be trained. But on the other, the training itself needs to face in two directions. The first direction is that we need to be trained in EU law. That is a gargantuan task.

The Commission contents itself with a goal that all legal practitioners, in particular judges and prosecutors (whose training is easier to control, as explained), should benefit from one week’s training in EU law and procedures during their career. That is modest, but probably achievable.

But the second direction is that we also need to be trained in the laws and procedures of other member states, since EU law is obviously not the only answer when dealing with cross-border cases of whatever kind. We also need to be able (at the very least) to understand how other member states' legal systems work, and hopefully more than that.

With 27 member states, all with their own legal systems, that is an even taller order than training everyone in EU law. Language is an issue here, but the most that the Commission recommends is that all stakeholders should pay attention to training on legal terminology of foreign languages. Then there are exchanges, and the Commission encourages that there should be 1,200 court exchanges per year. Lawyer exchanges are much more difficult to arrange because we are for the most part privately employed.

The Commission is to be commended for tackling such a difficult topic. EU law training is one of those areas which will benefit from a good deal more money, and the Commission says that it will use all possible tools to increase financial support. This is good news for lawyers - and also of course for training providers. The danger is that the numbers involved, and the two-directional nature of the training required (EU law and member state law), mean that anything less than a vast and probably unaffordable investment will prove to be the proverbial grain of sand on the beach.