Ontario Bar Exam: Open-Book Strategy, Indexing, and How to Actually Pass
The Ontario bar is open-book you can bring your printed LSO materials into the exam room. That sounds reassuring until you realize you have 4.5 hours, 160 questions, and hundreds of pages of materials. The exam is not a test of what you know. It is a test of how fast you can find what you need, confirm it, and move on.
What I Did: Back-to-Back in June 2023
I wrote the Barrister and Solicitor exams back-to-back in June 2023. My study approach was roughly three weeks on Barrister content, then I started Solicitor content, and then about a week before the Barrister exam, I switched back to Barrister material to refresh. After the Barrister exam, I had approximately two weeks to finish preparing for Solicitor which was enough time to get through the remaining content and do practice questions.
It was a tight schedule. But I want to be honest: it worked. The back-to-back approach is intense, but it also has a real advantage you build tremendous momentum, and many of the professional responsibility and professional conduct concepts overlap between the two exams.
The Open-Book Reality
The Ontario Barrister and Solicitor exams are open-book. The LSO provides official study materials printed binders that you bring into the exam room. These are the only materials you may use. No digital devices. No outside notes. No secondary resources.
At the end of each sitting, the materials are collected and cannot be taken home. New materials are issued for each exam cycle (released every April).
Here is the truth about open-book bar exams: "open book" does not mean you can look up every answer. With 160 questions in 4.5 hours, you have approximately 1 minute and 41 seconds per question. If you cannot issue-spot a question within seconds, locate the relevant section using your index within another 20–30 seconds, confirm your answer, and move on you will run out of time.
About 50 Pages a Day
My content reading pace was approximately 50 pages of materials per day sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the density of the content and the day I was having. I read through the materials completely before moving to intensive practice. I did not try to rush through this phase understanding the structure and substance of the materials is what enables fast navigation later.
I want to emphasize something: reading through the materials is not where you win or lose the exam. It is a necessary step to build familiarity. The real work happens in the practice phase that follows.
Highlighting Was Not For Me
I did not find highlighting effective for my preparation. Others swear by it. This is genuinely a matter of personal style some people find color-coded highlighting helps them locate information and remember where rules appear. I found that it slowed down my reading, created visual noise, and gave me a false sense of preparation ("I've marked the important parts") without the underlying comprehension.
What worked for me was reading actively, taking mental note of where specific topics appeared, and building a good index and system of tabs.
The Index: Your Most Important Tool
The single most important physical tool in the Ontario bar exam is a good index. This is not optional it is the difference between a passing and failing performance for candidates who know the content reasonably well.
The good news: you don't have to make your index from scratch. Several bar prep providers create pre-made indexes, and I believe the University of Toronto also releases one each year. These are worth obtaining and reviewing before deciding whether to use them or adapt them to your own system.
Whether you use a pre-made index or create your own, your index needs to be organized so that given any legal concept or question type that could appear on the exam, you can immediately look it up and find the section, tab, and approximate page where the answer lives in your materials.
What a good Ontario bar index looks like:
- Organized alphabetically by legal concept and topic area
- Each entry points to the specific section, topic, and approximate page of the LSO materials
- Cross-references where a topic appears under multiple categories
- Professional responsibility entries are especially detailed (see below)
- Compact enough to scan quickly not so detailed that it takes 30 seconds to find an entry
Binders, Tabs, and Physical Organization
I used separate, different-colored binders for each topic area of the materials. Each binder had:
- My index at the front
- The table of contents immediately following
- Tabbed dividers for each sub-section
- Additional tabs for sub-topics that appear frequently in practice questions
The physical organization strategy was: when I read a question and identify the topic, I can grab the right binder by color instantly, open to the right section using my tabs, and confirm my answer. This saved significant time on exam day compared to searching through a single large binder.
Tabbing the materials for commonly-tested subtopics particularly areas that come up frequently in practice questions is extremely valuable. As you do practice questions, you will quickly identify which sub-topics generate the most questions. Tab those sections prominently.
The Level of Understanding You Need
Here is the most important insight about how to study for the Ontario bar: you need to know that the answer is there, and approximately where it is not to know the answer cold from memory.
What I mean by this: when you encounter a question on the exam, the goal is not to already know the precise rule. The goal is to immediately recognize: "This is a negligence question about X scenario, I recall this falls under tort liability, section 4 of the civil litigation materials, and I have it tabbed." You go there, confirm, and move on.
This is a different kind of mastery than memorization. It requires familiarity with the structure of the materials, confidence in your navigation system, and enough substantive understanding to issue-spot quickly. Re-reading the materials 10 times will not get you to this level. A good index, well-organized materials, and practice lots of practice will.
Practice Is Everything
I used Emond for practice questions. There is also AccessBarPrep. I want to be clear about something: none of these services accurately reflect the actual exam questions. The LSO exam questions are distinct, and practice questions from third-party providers are generally harder, more convoluted, or different in style from what you'll see on the real exam. These tools are not designed to simulate the exam they are designed to help you practice finding answers in your materials quickly.
This is the right way to use practice questions for the Ontario bar: use them as navigation drills. When you get a question wrong, don't just check the answer go find the answer in your materials using your index. Practice the physical process of locating the answer. That is the skill the exam tests.
Professional Responsibility: Do Not Take It Lightly
I want to flag this specifically because it was consistently the hardest section for me throughout preparation, and I've heard the same from many other candidates: professional responsibility is difficult. The questions often involve subtle distinctions between what a lawyer must do, may do, or may not do and the Law Society's rules don't always align with intuition.
Give professional responsibility more time than you think it deserves. Know the Rules of Professional Conduct in detail. Make sure your index has extensive entries for PR topics. Do disproportionate practice on PR questions relative to other sections.
Time Management on Exam Day
The Barrister and Solicitor exams are each 4.5 hours with 160 multiple-choice questions. That is 101.25 seconds per question just under a minute and 42 seconds.
Break this down practically:
- Reading and issue-spotting the question: 15–20 seconds
- Locating the answer in materials: 20–40 seconds (if your index and tabs are good)
- Confirming and choosing: 10–15 seconds
- Buffer: 15–20 seconds
Questions where you know the answer immediately and confidently (without needing to look it up) take far less time giving you a buffer for harder questions where you do need to search. The goal is not to spend the same amount of time on every question. It's to spend minimal time on easy questions and allocate that time savings to harder ones.
If you read a question and cannot issue-spot within 5 seconds, do not spend 3 minutes searching your materials. Mark it, make your best guess, and come back if time permits.
What I'd Tell Someone Starting Today
- Get or build a good index before anything else. It is your most valuable tool.
- Read through the materials completely but do it with your index and table of contents in hand, noting where key concepts live.
- Organize physically: separate binders by topic area, tabs for frequently-tested subtopics.
- Start practice questions early not after you've finished all the reading. Do them concurrently from week 2 onward.
- Use practice as navigation drills, not knowledge tests. Every wrong answer is a chance to practice locating the right answer in your materials.
- Do not neglect professional responsibility. Treat it as its own intensive preparation area.
- Three weeks for Barrister, two weeks for Solicitor is a tight but workable schedule if you are focused and disciplined.