This article reveals the essence of a lawyer's professional duty to improve his qualifications, primarily through the prism of studying the stages of his formation and development.
 Within the framework of this article, the stages of the formation and development of the institute for improving the qualifications of a lawyer from the time of the Judicial Reform in 1864 to the present time were investigated. Important attention is paid to the study of changes in the attitude of the Ukrainian legislator to the duty of a lawyer to improve his qualifications during the times of independent Ukraine.
 The position is argued, according to which great importance has been attached to the qualification of lawyers and its improvement since ancient times, but the organizational design of the institute of professional advocacy was legally formalized as a result of the judicial reform of 1864, which essentially laid the foundations of a competent and self-governing organization of lawyers, in particular, provided for the functioning council of sworn attorneys, whose functions included checking the qualifications of its members. Emphasis is placed on the importance attached to the qualification of a lawyer during the period of the Soviet bar.
 To achieve the goal, the author used methods characteristic of legal science. The research was conducted primarily using the historical-legal, systemic-structural method and the dialectical method of learning legal reality.
 On the basis of the conducted research, the author comes to the conclusion that constant and continuous improvement of the qualifications of lawyers plays an important role in the functioning of professional advocacy. At the same time, on the one hand, efforts to improve the institution of lawyer’s qualification improvement, as a result of which a number of revisions of the regulations on the improvement of his qualification were adopted in a short time, and on the other hand, lack of consistency, frequent adoption of new revisions have a significant negative impact on this the institute as a whole, preventing the proper realization of its purpose.