Last week, I wrote about developments in France.

But there are changes of interest for lawyers taking place in other European countries, too.

Poland seems to be having the hardest time.

There is currently an Act on the State Legal Examination before the Polish Parliament.

It provides for a new type of legal profession, "legal counsel", who will be allowed - after graduating from a law faculty - to provide legal advice, and to act before public authorities and Courts of First Instance in certain cases.

This new legal profession will not be subject to any professional training; it will be able carry out its activities without having to comply with any ethical code or disciplinary regime.

I assume - but do not know if that is the case - that the Polish government favours this kind of development to open up competition and make legal services cheaper.

This is not the kind of development which should be copied elsewhere.

Not surprisingly, the two Polish legal professional bodies (they have two legal professions in Poland - legal advisors and advocates, an inheritance from previous times) have been campaigning strongly against this new third legal profession.

The CCBE has supported them, pointing out the importance of training, ethics and discipline, and the appearance of these three corner-stones of the legal profession and the rule of law in guidelines on the legal profession by the United Nations and the Council of Europe.

The second recent development involves cash registers, such as you see in a supermarket.

A rash of countries in central Europe has recently contemplated introducing them for lawyers when they are receiving money from clients, presumably as a counter-measure to tax evasion.

The CCBE has been busy providing letters and material support to bars facing their introduction.

It began in Serbia in June 2009.

In February 2010, the CCBE President and others met with the Serbian government and Parliamentary representatives to discuss the issue, and a consensus was reached to postpone the application of the system in order to explore possible solutions concerning the independence of the Bar and access to justice.

That is because these were seen as threatened, as can be seen from the following quote from a CCBE letter at the time: 'It allows the revenue authority to prohibit lawyers from exercising their profession if they do not use the cash register machines.

'An appeal against such a decision is not permitted. This provision puts the independence of the legal profession at stake in both the collective and individual senses.

'The self-government of the legal profession implies that normally only Bar Associations or Law Societies may impose sanctions that may affect the core of the legal practice and prohibit or suspend lawyers from practising their profession.'

Eventually, the lobbying was successful, but the contagion had taken hold elsewhere.

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) was the next country to consider the matter.

Since then, Poland, Albania and Armenia have introduced such registers in one form or other, and Slovenia and the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina are thinking about it.

And, finally, Spain has just had good news.

For a long time, Spain was the only Member State without a bar exam, meaning that a lawyer could gain a lawyer title by having a law degree (four-five years in Spain) and then applying to the Bar to be recognised as a lawyer without further examination.

Not surprisingly, this led to some forum shopping, principally by Italians apparently, who went to Spain to become a lawyer, thereby circumventing their own national bar exam.

Spain was embarrassed, and after much struggle - mainly from Spanish law students who violently protested against a new obstacle being put in their way to becoming a lawyer - a law was passed five years ago to introduce a compulsory bar exam.

The implementation was delayed by five years to allow the present crop of law students to qualify under the old system, thus applying only to new students.

There had been some debate about whether even that five years would be extended - which would have helped those students who did not manage to finish the course in five years - but on 3 June the new regulation was passed, confirming that the law will come into effect after five years, on 1 November 2011.

Of course, this round-up does not cover our own UK, which has its own excitements…