How to Pass the Ontario Bar Exams (2026)
So, you’re gearing up for the Ontario Bar Exams — the LSO Barrister Exam and the LSO Solicitor Exam — and wondering: how do people actually pass these things? You’ve probably heard the stories, seen the binders, looked on Reddit, and told yourself, “It’s open book, how bad can it be?” But anyone who’s written them will tell you the harsh reality: open book doesn’t mean easy. It means organized, strategic, and focused.
The Barrister Exam covers professional responsibility, where you’ll encounter topics on ethical duties; public law, including constitutional principles and Charter rights; criminal law, such as criminal procedure and evidence; family law, including parenting and support issues; and civil litigation, where you’ll see civil court processes and procedural rules. These are just some of the subjects you’ll encounter — the exam is not limited to what’s listed here.
The Solicitor Exam focuses on business law, where you’ll come across corporate structures and commercial transactions; real estate law, including property transfers and title issues; wills and estates, covering estate planning and will drafting; and professional responsibility, with topics such as trust account obligations. Again, these are only examples — the actual exam covers much more.
Both exams are multiple-choice, open-book, and based entirely on the LSO Bar Materials — which, when printed, could easily function as a small piece of furniture. You’re not being tested on memorization; you’re being tested on how well you can apply legal concepts to practical scenarios. If you’ve ever wanted to know what it feels like to compete in an academic version of “The Amazing Race,” welcome to bar prep — except your finish line is question 160 on a Scantron sheet.
Understanding the Exams
Preparing Strategically: LSO Study Materials and Active Engagement
A solid bar prep plan isn’t about reading every page word-for-word or blindly following someone else’s schedule. Reading alone doesn’t mean retaining. There are hundreds of pages to get through, and you have to actively engage with the material to really process it. Examples of active engagement include:
● Breaking down complex sections into your own words
● Drawing mindmaps
● Making flashcards for key rules and exceptions
● Doing timed practice exams
● Teaching a topic out loud as if you’re explaining it to someone else
● Revisiting difficult areas and rewriting notes to reinforce retention
Highlight with purpose. Write short margin notes that summarize key points or flag exceptions. The goal isn’t to make your materials pretty; it’s to make them functional. The more familiar you are with your resources, the faster you’ll be able to navigate them when you’re under pressure.
Tabbing is crucial. This means marking or organizing your materials so key sections, formulas, rules, or topics are easy to find quickly. Tab your LSO materials, charts, summaries, indices, or DTOC in a way that makes sense to you. Colour coding can help. You can consider using a blue highlighter for timelines, green for procedural stepsethics, yellow for penalties/consequences of breaking a rule, etc. Keeping a consistent colour-coding scheme is what saves you when your brain is tired while quickly searching a page for information you need. Remember, you don’t want to highlight every other word on a page so it turns out looking like a disco ball in a 1980’s New York club. When it comes to highlighting, less is more.
Study Habits and Time Management
Divide your readings into manageable sections, mix in regular review (especially after reading each subject area), and carve out time to practice applying the material using practice questions. You can’t just “cover” the readings — you need to work with them until patterns start to sink in.
When creating a study schedule, map out your readings (and breaks) for each day up until exam day. This way, you know exactly what you should be covering on any given day and can avoid having to cram everything in the last few weeks before the exam.
Burnout is common, and it’s your worst enemy when trying to retain information. Regular rest, healthy meals, and sleep are just as important as practice questions. Remember, your brain consolidates information while you rest, not while staring at page 273 of Business Law for the fourth time.
Once you've finished reading a subject area, don't move on just yet. Do practice questions. Around 40 subject-specific questions is the sweet spot. It's the difference between thinking you understood Real Estate Law and actually finding out (humbling, but necessary). After you've worked through each subject, do full 160-question practice exams to bring everything together and spot the gaps (and there will be gaps, that's totally normal and kind of the whole point).
One thing a lot of candidates skip that really makes a difference: start with untimed questions before you ever introduce a timer. Give yourself the grace to get comfortable with the material first. Then, when you're ready to simulate the real thing, the clock comes in. The barrister and solicitor exams have a writing time of 4.5 hours each, which gives you about 1 minute and 40 seconds per question — so pacing matters more than you'd think. To help you stay on track, grab the SimpliLaw Timer Sheet (click here) so you're not doing mental math mid-exam when your brain has way better things to focus on.
When you do practice exams, try to do them in the same conditions you'll be in on exam day. For example, the same materials, same setup, etc. The more familiar it feels before the exam day, the calmer you'll feel when you’re in the exam centre.
And this one's important: review the practice questions after you're done answering them. You want to know why the correct answer is correct, and why each wrong answer is wrong. That's honestly where so much of the learning happens.
Download the SimpliLaw Bar Exam Error Analysis Worksheet (click here for it) to make your review sessions way more organized and effective.
Practice Exam Questions
Exam day is not the time to wing it; you want to have a strategy going in. And before anything else, the nerves at the start of the exam when you’re looking at the exam booklet are completely normal. Your brain might go,"wait, what is happening right now." That's fine. That's literally everyone. The first few questions are your warm-up. You'll feel yourself click into gear pretty quickly, so don't let that initial shakiness convince you that you're not ready. You are.
Once you're moving, read each question and answer choice properly before you commit to an answer. Not a skim but an actual read. The fastest way to lose easy marks is misreading what's being asked and confidently answering the wrong thing. And if you hit a question that has you staring into the void, make your best guess or flag it, and move on. You don’t want to sit there for five minutes negotiating with yourself. That's the fastest way to run out of time, and those five minutes could've answered three other questions you actually knew.
The nice thing about the exam is that you don’t have to go through the questions in the order they’re laid out. You can start with your strongest subject first, bank that confidence and that time, then work your way into the subjects you find harder. And within each subject area, you can do the same thing — skim the questions, grab the easy ones first, then circle back to the ones that need more thought or require you to look at your charts/LSO study materials. You're not skipping, you're triaging. There's a difference, and it's a good one.
The goal is simple: don't let one stubborn question eat the time you need for five others you could've nailed.
Bar Exam Day Strategy
Mindset and Confidence
The final week is a lot. Like, a lot a lot. You're going to hit a point where you stare at your materials and your brain just goes completely blank and you start wondering if you even went to law school. You did. You have the debt to prove it.
That spiral where you convince yourself you know nothing? It's a lie. It's just your brain throwing a little tantrum because it's tired and overstimulated and has seen the words "conflict of interest" one too many times. Totally normal. Deeply annoying. Keep going anyway.
The thing about this exam that actually takes the pressure off a little — it's open book. You're not being quizzed on memory. Instead, you're being tested on whether you can find information and apply it under a time crunch. So the quality of your materials genuinely matters here. Charts you can scan within ten seconds is worth so much more on exam day than fifty pages of notes you highlighted in four different colours and never looked at again.
At some point in the final week before the exam, you might have to stop adding new information and just let what's already in your brain settle. More cramming is not always more helpful. Sleep, eat an actual meal at some point, and try not to let the anxiety convince you that you're less prepared than you are, because it will try. And when you finally see that “Pass” from the LSO, you’ll realize it wasn’t about knowing every single detail; it was about believing you could do it.
Legally caffeinated and signing off,
RK
Your friendly neighbourhood bar-exam survivor