Should You Write the Barrister and Solicitor Exams in the Same Sitting?

Every licensing cycle, the same debate runs through candidate forums: write the Barrister and Solicitor exams in the same sitting, or split them across two? Both paths produce lawyers every year. The right answer depends on three things: your available study hours, your risk tolerance, and your timeline to licensing.

The case for the same sitting

• Momentum and shared content. Ethics and professional responsibility appear on both exams; study them once, benefit twice. Your index-building and lookup skills also peak once — splitting the exams means peaking twice.
• A faster call to the bar. Passing both in one sitting can shave months off your licensing timeline, which matters if a job offer or articling start date is waiting.
• A built-in hedge. The exams are independent: pass one and it is banked for the rest of your licensing term even if you fail the other. Same-sitting candidates who have a bad day usually still walk away with one pass.

The case for splitting them

• You are working full-time or articling. Two exams in one sitting demands roughly 150 to 220 total study hours. At a working candidate’s 12 to 15 hours a week, that is a four-month grind with zero slack for the bad week when work explodes.
• You want to de-risk. A focused single exam is simply more likely to pass. If a fail would cost you a job start date or push you against your licensing-term deadline, certainty beats speed.
• You are newer to Ontario law. Many NCA candidates find that doubling unfamiliar content in one window lowers the quality of both preparations.

Which exam should you write first?

If you split, the conventional wisdom is Barrister first — its materials are larger, and its litigation, criminal, and family content overlaps more with the work most articling students actually see, so the studying does double duty. But there is a real exception: if your articling or LPP placement is heavily transactional (real estate, corporate, estates), writing the Solicitor exam first while that knowledge is fresh and reinforced daily is entirely rational. Match the exam order to your day job, not to tradition.

Can you study for both at the same time?

Yes — but do it as sequential-with-overlap, not as daily alternation. Read the Barrister materials in full first. Then read the Solicitor set while keeping the Barrister warm with evening practice questions. Alternating subjects day by day feels productive but fractures the first full read of each set, which is the foundation everything else sits on.