Should you sit one exam or both in the same sitting?

You do not have to sit both. The examinations run three times a year, and in any sitting you can take the Barrister, the Solicitor, or both. Plenty of candidates take one, pass it, and take the other next time.

That is worth saying plainly, because a lot of people treat sitting both as the default and only discover it was a choice when they are eight weeks in and behind.

Decide it with arithmetic, not with pride

The honest input is time. Here is what each option needs, at a normal reading pace, reading the materials twice, with practice built in:

Now count the weeks you actually have. Not the weeks on the calendar, the weeks you can genuinely give five hours a day to, with articling or work or a family in them.

If that number is comfortably above the range for both, take both. If it is below it, you are not choosing between two exams and one exam. You are choosing between one prepared exam and two under-prepared ones, and only one of those is a plan.

The study planner will do this with your own reading speed and tell you the start date each option needs.

The real argument for doing both

There is one, and it is better than people think.

The two sets of materials overlap. The first fifteen chapters of Professional Responsibility and the appendices are identical, which is why both together is roughly 1,694 pages rather than 2,016. Read that material once and it counts for both papers. Doing both in one sitting saves you 322 pages, plus the cost of coming back to a subject cold months later.

There is a momentum argument too. You are already in the material, already in the habit, already sitting long papers. Starting again in four months means rebuilding all of that.

The two reasons people get it wrong

"The Solicitor one is easier, so it will not add much." It is not, and it does. This belief usually comes from candidates who wrote the Barrister paper first and found the second one more tractable, which is partly true and mostly confounded: by then they had learned how to sit a 4.5-hour multiple-choice exam. More on that in which exam is harder.

"Taking one looks bad." It does not. Nothing about the licensing process records how many sittings you spread your exams across, and nobody who has been through it thinks less of it. The thing that actually costs you is an unsuccessful attempt, which is a real setback in time, money and morale.

If you are doing both

Two things change about how you plan.

Read the shared material once, early. Do Professional Responsibility during the Barrister pass and treat it as done. It is the one genuine efficiency in the licensing year.

Do not run two plans end to end. Finish the first exam's second pass before the first paper, then use the gap between the two papers for the second exam's second pass rather than starting it cold. The gap is short, so the second exam's first pass has to already be behind you.

If you are doing one

Pick the one you are further along in, not the one you think is easier. Familiarity is worth more than a reputation, and you will have a full sitting to prepare the other properly.

Then actually use the gap. The most common way to waste this decision is to take one exam, pass it, do nothing for three months, and arrive at the second one having forgotten how to sit a long paper.

The short version

• Three sittings a year, and you choose which papers you take in each.
• Barrister needs 7 to 9 weeks, Solicitor 8 to 11, both 12 to 16.
• Count the weeks you can genuinely give it, then choose.
• Doing both saves 322 pages of overlap, plus the cost of coming back cold.
• "The Solicitor one is easier" and "taking one looks bad" are both wrong, and both cost people exams.