Poland’s legal profession is not one profession but six, each with its own bar, its own traineeship and its own entry rules. An advocate (adwokat) and an attorney-at-law (radca prawny) do similar work under separate self-governing bodies; notaries, court enforcement officers, prosecutors and judges each form another distinct group. Moving between them is legally possible. We wanted to know how often it actually happens.

Between 2020 and 2025 the President of Poland appointed 2,387 judges to the common courts. For 1,068 of them we could establish what they did immediately beforehand, and the answer is lopsided: 714 came from the post of court assessor, the in-house apprenticeship rung that leads almost automatically to the bench. Only 209 came from the bar and 103 from the attorneys-at-law. Six were notaries. Not one was a court enforcement officer.

The prosecution service is more closed still. In every year we examined, prosecutorial assessors accounted for between 94 and 98 percent of new appointments. The sharp rise in 2024, when appointments jumped from 129 to 205, was not an opening to outside lawyers but a large assessor cohort coming of age.

Timing matters as much as origin. More than half of all judicial appointments in the six-year period fell in 2021 and 2022 — precisely when the status of the National Council of the Judiciary and the procedure for appointing judges were central to the European Commission’s rule of law concerns. After 2023 appointments dropped sharply, and the Ministry of Justice stopped publishing information about some vacant judicial posts. We do not claim a causal chain here. We do show that the pace of filling judicial and prosecutorial posts tracked both institutional turbulence and the internal rhythm of assessor cohorts.

Three interviews with lawyers who did change profession round out the picture. They described the formal rules as permissive but the environments as separate and not fully permeable, with the barriers as much cultural as procedural, and the window for switching narrowing with every year of seniority.

The report rests on seven freedom of information requests sent to the professional bodies, the Ministry of Justice, the National Public Prosecutor’s Office and the National Council of the Judiciary in June 2026, supplemented with public statistics. One answer was itself a finding: the National Council of Court Enforcement Officers replied that it does not record what its members did before.

The report Career Paths in the Legal Professions Marzena Błaszczyk, Michał Zemełka.