EPSO Lawyer Competition 2026: AD7 Routes & 6 Fields

A Seven-Year Gap, About to Close

EPSO has not run a substantive Law specialist competition since EPSO/AD/374/19 in 2019. That Notice produced a reserve list of 156 administrators across five fields — Competition Law, Financial Law, EMU Law, Financial Rules of the EU Budget, and Protection of Euro Coins against Counterfeiting. Since then, the EU Commission's Legal Service and the legal units of other institutions have relied on internal mobility, contract agents, and the residue of older reserve lists.

The 2026 Lawyers competitions, announced in the EPSO upcoming-procedures calendar, will be the first substantive Law NoCs in seven years. They arrive in two blocks. The first block covers the traditional Commission domains: Competition Law, Financial and EMU Law, and Litigation Law. The second block reflects newer regulatory priorities: AI Law, Criminal Law, and Energy Law. Together they signal a major staffing-up of EU legal capacity in areas where enforcement and litigation are intensifying.

The Notices themselves have not yet been published in the Official Journal. The exact grades, reserve list sizes, syllabi, and language regimes are pending. What is known — and what this article documents — is the framework set by the 2019 cycle and the new EPSO model applied to specialist competitions since 2024.

Lawyer-Linguist Is Not Law Specialist

Before going further, a clarification that costs candidates time every year. Lawyer-linguist competitions — EPSO/AD/404/23 through EPSO/AD/409/23 in 2023, EPSO/AD/423/25 and EPSO/AD/424/25 in 2025 — are linguistic profiles. They recruit lawyers whose work is to translate, revise, and produce EU legal texts in their target language. The roles sit in the Translation Service of the Court of Justice and in the legal-revision units of the Commission and the Council.

Substantive Lawyer competitions recruit administrators whose work is legal analysis: drafting pleadings before the Court, managing infringement files, scrutinising legislative proposals, advising on competition cases, representing the institution in negotiations. The two tracks share a law degree as the foundational qualification but diverge on almost everything else — including the second language requirement, the test format, the typical career path, and the institutional placement.

EPSO/AD/374/19 — The Last Substantive Law NoC

Published in OJ C 191A of 6 June 2019, EPSO/AD/374/19 recruited AD7 administrators for the European Commission. The five fields and their reserve list sizes:

For the Competition Law field, the Notice set out four eligibility routes. The verbatim primary route required a four-year university diploma in law plus at least six years of professional experience related to the application of competition rules and procedures. A three-year law degree could substitute with seven years of experience. Notably — and unusually for a Law NoC — non-law degrees were accepted with longer experience: four-year non-law degrees with eight years, three-year non-law degrees with nine years.

The Financial Law and EMU Law fields were stricter. Only law degrees were accepted: four-year law diploma plus six years of experience, or three-year diploma plus seven years.

The language regime mirrored the institutional working practice. Language 1 was any of the 24 official EU languages at C1. Language 2 was restricted to English, French, German, or Italian at B2.

EPSO/AD/365–370/19 — The Court of Justice Legal Research Specialists

Six parallel competitions, published in OJ C 85A of 7 March 2019, recruited Specialists in Legal Research for the Court of Justice. The six national legal systems covered: Cypriot, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, and Polish law. Total reserve list size: around 40 candidates across AD5 and AD7 grades.

Eligibility was tightly specific to each national legal system:

• Cyprus: University law degree plus a successful bar examination in Cyprus. (This was the only field across the entire 2019 cycle to require bar admission.)
• Greece: A Πτυχίο νομικής.
• Hungary: An Állam- és jogtudományi diploma.
• Italy: One of three specific laurea options in diritto italiano.
• Latvia: A professional, bacalaur, magister, or doctor diploma in law sciences.
• Poland: A magister prawa or equivalent.

AD5 required no professional experience. AD7 required at least six years of relevant experience. For both grades, Language 2 had to be French — the working language of the Court — at B2, with the written test and assessment centre conducted entirely in French.

For a broader overview of how specialist competitions work across all fields, see our EPSO specialist competitions FRMCQ guide.

The Old Test Model

EPSO/AD/374/19 used the assessment-centre model that has now been retired. The selection sequence:

1. Reasoning tests in Language 1: VR 20 questions in 35 minutes (pass 10/20), NR 10 questions in 20 minutes, AR 10 questions in 10 minutes (NR+AR combined pass 10/20). Pass-or-fail gate, not weighted in ranking.

2. Talent Screener in Language 2: paper-based screening of qualifications and professional experience. Selection Board scored answers from 0 to 4, weighted by criterion importance (1 to 3). Only the top performers advanced.

3. Assessment Centre in Language 2, held in Brussels over one to two days, with four exercises: a general competency-based interview, a group exercise, a written case study, a field-related interview. Pass marks: 3/10 per general competency and 40/80 total; 50/100 on the field-related interview.

Field knowledge in the old model was tested through the case study and the field-related interview — there was no field-related MCQ for Law competitions. Up to three times the reserve list size were invited to the AC; final ranking combined the AC scores per field.

The New Test Model

This is the model the 2026 Lawyers cycle will follow. We explain the full shift in our EPSO new competition model explainer. Since EPSO retired the assessment centre in 2024, specialist competitions use a single online testing day with remote proctoring. The template applied to EPSO/AD/426/25 in November 2025, and by extension expected for the 2026 Lawyers cycle:

The decisive change: the FRMCQ is now the sole ranking instrument. Reasoning is a gate. EUFTE is a gate. Only the FRMCQ score determines who makes the reserve list. Whether the 2026 Lawyers cycle will retain any element of a written case study alongside the FRMCQ and EUFTE is not yet known — the EPSO/AD/426/25 template suggests the EUFTE will fully replace the case study, but a Lawyer-specific drafting exercise cannot be ruled out until the Notice is published.

Annex II Syllabus — Historical Content and 2026 Expectations

EPSO/AD/374/19 Annex II named the substantive law that the field interview and case study would draw on. For Competition Law: the application of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU, State aid under Article 107 TFEU, the Merger Regulation 139/2004, the procedural Regulation 1/2003, and the case law of the Court of Justice and General Court in the field. For Financial Law: the body of EU financial regulation, banking law, capital markets law. For EMU Law: the Treaty provisions on Economic and Monetary Union, ECB regulations, the Stability and Growth Pact and its surrounding instruments.

For the 2026 fields that have no precedent — AI Law, Criminal Law, Energy Law — the Annex II content will be set in each NoC when published. Based on current EU legislative activity, the expected core readings would include: for AI Law, the AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) and the proposed AI Liability Directive; for Criminal Law, Directive (EU) 2017/1371 on the protection of the EU's financial interests, Regulation (EU) 2017/1939 establishing the European Public Prosecutor's Office, and the Mutual Recognition framework decisions; for Energy Law, the recast Renewable Energy Directive (EU) 2023/2413, the recast Energy Efficiency Directive (EU) 2023/1791, the recast Electricity Market Regulation, and the legislative outputs of the Fit-for-55 package. These are inferences from policy priority, not Annex II quotations.

AD versus AST in Law

There is no AST Law competition in the modern EPSO archive. The AST3 competitions of the past five years (EPSO/AST/154/22 cancelled; EPSO/AST/156/24 Finance; EPSO/AST/157/25 Communication) do not include a legal field. Legal assistant work in the EU institutions is recruited through three other channels:

• Contract Agents under CAST Permanent, particularly the FG IV "Legal Officer" profile. Recruitment is rolling; the CAST database is the practical entry point for legal support roles below the AD grade.
• Internal AST mobility from other competitions, with applicable training and on-the-job qualification.
• Référendaires in the Court of Justice — the cabinet lawyers attached directly to Judges and Advocates General. These are not EPSO-recruited; they are appointed directly by the Member of the Court they serve.

When EPSO does recruit Lawyers, it recruits at AD level. Within that, the differences between AD5 and AD7 matter:

The Commission's substantive Law competitions have historically been AD7-only. The Court of Justice Legal Research Specialists were the only competitions to recruit at both AD5 and AD7 in parallel.

Reserve List Sizes — A Selective Path

Law reserve lists are small. The largest field in 2019 was Competition Law at 60 places — more than double the 27 places of the 2014 EPSO/AD/293/14 Competition Law field, but still tiny compared to the 970-place Economics competition or the 1,490-place 2026 AD5 generalist. EMU Law in 2019 produced only 13 laureates.

This makes Law one of the more selective specialist tracks. The eligibility threshold filters out most applicants — six years of relevant legal experience is not a casual requirement — and the case-study assessment in the old model further narrowed the cohort. Under the new FRMCQ model, the bottleneck will shift to mastery of EU substantive law in multiple-choice form.

What to Prepare

Eligibility documentation is strict — see our EPSO eligibility requirements complete guide before you compile your evidence.

For candidates planning to apply when the 2026 Lawyers Notices appear, the most useful preparation is also the most direct: read the actual legal sources of the field, in the language of the eligibility-relevant Member State or in the EU working language you intend to use as Language 2.

For Competition Law: the Articles of the TFEU on competition, the Block Exemption Regulations relevant to the field, the Commission's leading decisions of the last decade, the General Court and Court of Justice judgments cited in those decisions. For AI Law: the AI Act itself, including the Annexes that define high-risk systems, prohibited practices, and obligations on general-purpose AI providers. For Energy Law: the body of post-Fit-for-55 directives and regulations as they entered into force in 2023 and 2024.

The FRMCQ tests what the regulation says. Not what a textbook summarises about the regulation. The difference matters once you face 30 multiple-choice questions in 40 minutes.

References and Sources

All factual claims in this article come from official sources:

• EPSO/AD/374/19 — OJ C 191A, 6.6.2019
• EPSO/AD/365–370/19 — OJ C 85A, 7.3.2019
• EPSO/AD/293/14 — OJ C 376A, 23.10.2014
• EPSO/AD/426/25 — OJ C/2025/5881 (template for new test model)
• EPSO/AD/427/26 — OJ C/2026/711 (scoring weights reference)
• EPSO upcoming selection procedures
• EPSO Annual Activity Report 2024 (PDF)
• Court of Justice of the EU — Specialists in Legal Research description

Specific provisions of EU primary law and secondary legislation cited above are accessible through EUR-Lex.