Last week, I wrote about how EU funding has helped lawyers, through the creation of a Find-A-Lawyer database (some welcomed the money, others saw it is a waste). I should have called it EU funding - part 1. This week comes part 2, which tells how EU funding is supporting lawyers in the field of legal training.

The European Commission has begun to take the training of lawyers seriously. You might wonder why it is its business. Well, it has an interest in seeing EU law properly implemented by practitioners, whether they are judges, prosecutors, lawyers, notaries, bailiffs or court staff. It also has an interest in ensuring that, in the single market, practitioners have appropriate knowledge of other member states’ law and legal systems. It published a Communication in 2011, called ‘Building trust in EU-wide justice - a new dimension to European judicial training’, about which I wrote at the time.

Now it has just published a ‘Report on judicial training 2011’. That might seem out of date, but it is the first year after the launch of the Communication for which a snapshot could be produced of just how many practitioners were being trained. The Commission set itself a goal of ensuring that 700,000 of them – half of all legal practitioners in the EU – were trained in European law or the law of another member state by 2020. In this first report, it announces proudly that at least 87,000 legal practitioners - more than expected - were trained in EU law or the national law of another member state in 2011; the training of 10 000 of those participants was (co-)funded by the EU.

The figure regarding lawyers, though, is not high. Although lawyers formed the grouping with the highest absolute number of people trained in that year (26,664), this as a percentage of the profession - 4% - was among the lowest because of the high number of lawyers. Judges and prosecutors did better at 25% and 18% apiece.

The commission is putting its money where its mouth is, and has recently awarded two sums of money to improve lawyer training at EU level. The first tranche has been granted to the organisation for which I work, the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), and is intended for the construction of what we call a European Training Platform. It is a simple idea: the creation of a single website, or electronic platform, on which training courses for lawyers around the EU will be advertised, to allow lawyers to find a suitable training course easily.

It is principally aimed at assisting in the training of EU law and the law of another member state, but will also be able to be used incidentally by national practitioners looking for national training. We are still in the process of refining the concept, but the search fields are likely to include the title of the course, venue, date, language, continuing education accreditation and practice area. Clearly, we will be reaching out to training providers as the system is being designed – indeed, the end product should be a very useful tool for them to reach a wider audience, including beyond national borders.

Second, the commission has just awarded a tender for a research project into the training of European lawyers. The successful consortium is led by the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA), assisted by the CCBE. The project has three main objectives: establishing the state of play of training of EU lawyers on EU law, developing exchanges of good practice, and drafting recommendations on how to increase the quality and quantity of training courses. The project will include the creation of detailed factsheets on each national training system, a survey of training providers, a description of existing training activities which include aspects of EU law, and the development of a toolkit for dissemination of good practice. Each bar will appoint a contact point, and once more the input of national training providers will be important.

The crowning glory of all this activity will be a conference taking place on 10 April in Brussels, called ‘Stimulating European Judicial Training - Supporting judicial training of European legal professionals’. It is aimed at training providers and bars, among others. Registration is by invitation only.

I know that none of this will change minds. Eurosceptics and cynics will see it as the usual waste of time and money. But I - ever the Euro-optimist and enthusiast - am pleased that the EU is rightly investing some money in improving lawyer training.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs