Practising Law in France with a Foreign Degree: What French Do You Actually Need?
No French rule sets a language level for foreign-trained lawyers. What the texts actually require.
No French regulation sets a language level for practising law in France with a foreign degree: no A2, no B2, no test. The decree of 27 November 1991 asks for something else, and it is more concrete: a report written in French, an oral of about twenty minutes per subject, 10 out of 20, three attempts.
What French level does the law require of a foreign-trained lawyer?
None. The route from a legal qualification obtained outside France to the French bar is the aptitude examination of article 99 of decree no. 91-1197 of 27 November 1991, whose text and document list appear in the file published by the Conseil national des barreaux. You will find degree conditions, experience conditions, deadlines, a marking scale. Nowhere a threshold from the Common European Framework, nor any obligation to sit a DELF or a TCF.
What is required instead is counted differently. On the degree side, a post-secondary course of at least one year. On experience, at least three years for a qualification from a third state recognised by a member state, or two years of full-time practice over the last ten years where the home state does not regulate the profession. On language, two firm obligations: a personal report "established in the French language", and French translations of the supporting documents, apart from identity and nationality papers.
In common-law countries, bar admission usually runs through a professional body that sets its own language evidence, often an interview or a certificate. France chose the opposite for lawyers: it does not measure the language, it tests it in a written and an oral examination on law. Other French professions work the other way: see the level required in healthcare, or the stated requirements for immigrating to Canada.
What is the French-language report the file asks for?
It is the most personal item in the file, and nobody can write it for you. In French, the applicant explains why their training is not substantially different from French training, or how they have closed the gap. Neither a cover letter nor a career summary: a legal argument about your own path. On French administrative writing conventions, the French CV gives a first idea.
The rest of the file goes through translation, done by a translator on the national list of judicial experts, on a court of appeal list, or authorised in a state of the European Economic Area. The deadlines are written down: the Conseil national des barreaux acknowledges receipt within one month and gives a reasoned decision within three months of the complete file. After that, silence counts as refusal and opens an appeal before the Paris Court of Appeal.
What does the oral of the aptitude examination look like?
The examination covers at most four subjects from the programme of the French certificate of aptitude for the profession of lawyer, chosen from what the file shows. Each subject means an oral of about twenty minutes, after half an hour of preparation. If four tests are imposed, one is written, lasts four hours and is anonymous. Admission requires an average of at least 10 out of 20, and the order of 7 January 1993, amended in 2007 and 2009, is blunt about attempts: "Nul ne peut se présenter plus de trois fois à l'examen d'aptitude", nobody may sit the aptitude examination more than three times. The summons arrives at least one month before the first test.
Twenty minutes is short: you hold a technical argument, answer questions you did not choose, rephrase when the panel is unconvinced. It is the exercise of a job interview in French raised to a far higher level of terminological precision. The profession is mostly entered by another door: according to the 2026 key figures of the legal profession from the Conseil national des barreaux, 4,132 trainee lawyers were preparing to join in 2026, and women made up 58.8 % of the profession.
Do you need a French diploma, and which one actually exists?
The texts ask for none. Many candidates still want one, because an employer asks for it or because it structures their preparation. So it matters to know what exists: in the current documentation, there is no professional French diploma for law. The presentation of the professional French diploma from the Paris Île-de-France regional chamber of commerce and industry, version 2025_10_01, describes a single specialism, Business, in five levels.
The scale is quantified: 60 to 80 learning hours for A1 and a 60-minute exam, 120 to 150 hours for A2 and 60 minutes, 250 hours for B1 and 1 hr 50, 350 hours for B2 and 2 hr 30, 500 hours for C1 and 2 hr 30. A lawyer will therefore find the DFP Affaires B2 or C1, a diploma in business French, not in law. To see where you stand, a level test takes a few minutes.
What these texts do not say
No official threshold does not mean no real requirement. The report is read by French-speaking lawyers and the oral is held before a panel: the level is assessed, it simply has no name. These texts are also old, the 1991 decree amended in 2004, 2005 and 2009, the 1993 order in 2007 and 2009. Any real application starts by checking the version in force with the Conseil national des barreaux.
Three more reservations. Article 99 is not article 11: the knowledge-control examination is a separate procedure, which this article does not cover. The Conseil national des barreaux publishes no pass rate for this aptitude examination, so no statistic of difficulty is available. And translation by a listed translator is a real cost the texts do not price. One note on our figures: the key figures page shows no total number of lawyers, so we do not publish one, and it lists the bar schools without printing a count, which we do not give either.
That leaves a three-step decision rule. First, identify which case you fall under, depending on whether your home state regulates the profession. Second, count your years of practice over the last ten and gather the translations. Third, measure your French where it will be judged: a reasoned report and twenty minutes of law, not general conversation.
At Frenchee, our teachers are native speakers with a master's in teaching French, and lessons are live, one to one or in a small group of three to five. No subscription. The reason fits in one sentence here: reading a decree, gathering papers, counting years of practice, all of that you do alone. Whether your written French carries a report, and whether your speaking holds twenty minutes of questions on law, is measured in front of someone who corrects you.
