What's actually on the Barrister exam

The Barrister examination covers Civil Litigation, Criminal Law, Family Law and Public Law, with Professional Responsibility running underneath all four. It is 160 multiple-choice questions over four hours and thirty minutes, open book, grouped into sections by area of law.

That is the surface answer, and it is the one every site gives you. The more useful answer is what the questions are testing, which is a different thing from what they are about.

Two ways to describe the same paper

The Law Society describes the examination twice, and candidates usually only read one of the descriptions.

The first is by area of law, which is how the paper is organised and how you will study. Four subjects, plus professional conduct threaded through.

The second is by competency. The Law Society publishes a list of entry-level barrister competencies organised under seven headings:

• ethical and professional responsibilities
• knowledge of the law
• establishing and maintaining the barrister-client relationship
• problem/issue identification, analysis and assessment
• alternative dispute resolution
• litigation process
• practice management issues

Underneath those headings sit several hundred individual competencies. Questions are written against them.

This matters because those two descriptions cut the same paper in different directions, and your weaknesses do not respect the first one. A candidate who says "I'm bad at Family Law" is usually not bad at all of Family Law. They are losing marks in one competency, and it is showing up in Family Law because that is where they happened to meet it. The same weakness is quietly costing them marks in Civil Litigation too.

Narrowing "I'm weak in a subject" to "I'm weak at issue identification, and it shows up worst in Family Law" is the difference between a week of rereading and an afternoon of targeted work.

The four areas, and what each tends to ask

Civil Litigation is the largest presence on the paper for most candidates and the one where procedure bites hardest. Deadlines, steps, who can do what and when. It rewards knowing where things sit in a sequence rather than what they mean in the abstract.

Criminal Law tends to be more conceptually familiar to candidates fresh from law school and more procedurally unfamiliar. Candidates who know the offences find themselves losing marks on process.

Family Law is the one candidates most often mis-estimate. It looks approachable, it involves human situations that are easy to follow, and it hides a great deal of specific rule content underneath that readability.

Public Law is the smallest of the four for most candidates and the easiest to neglect until late. Neglecting it is defensible on a marks-at-stake basis, right up until it isn't.

Be careful with all of that, though. Those are tendencies we see in candidates, not published weightings, and your own paper is the only evidence that counts.

Professional Responsibility is not a fifth subject

It is the thing the other four are sitting on.

Conduct questions are threaded through the paper rather than fenced into one section, and they arrive inside realistic fact patterns rather than announcing themselves. You are not usually asked "what does the rule say". You are shown a situation where a lawyer is about to do something, and asked what they should do.

Two things follow. First, you cannot skip it, because there is no section to skip. Second, it appears on the Solicitor paper too, so preparing it once serves both sittings. If you are writing both papers this year, it is the best-value study time available to you. The practice is the part that does not transfer, because a conduct question arrives inside a subject's fact pattern, and on this paper those are litigation retainers and family matters. Ours are in the Barrister Professional Responsibility pack, with a free quiz if you want to test yourself before buying anything.

What the questions look like

Four options, exactly one best answer, and no "all of the above" or "none of the above". That last detail is worth internalising, because it removes a guessing strategy you may be carrying from other exams and it means every option is a real candidate answer.

Some questions stand alone. Others come in case-based sets that share a fact pattern, and each question in a set is answerable independently of the others. That independence is deliberate and useful: getting the first question of a set wrong does not cascade.

The questions are derived from the study materials the Law Society prepares for that licensing year, and those materials are updated annually. Which is the real reason last year's notes are a liability rather than a shortcut.

Open book, and what that changes

Both papers are open book, print materials only, with no digital access in the testing area.

This sounds like relief and is mostly pressure. Open book means the questions are not testing recall, so the marks are not sitting where you can look them up. They are sitting in the reasoning you do after you have found the passage, and in whether you can find it fast enough for that reasoning to be worth anything.

Which makes your index the single most important physical object you will bring. There is a whole post coming on building one. For now: an index you have not used under time pressure is not an index, it is a document.

How to use this

If you are planning your study, three things follow from all of the above:

1. Do not plan by subject alone. Plan by subject, then check your competency breakdown, because that is where a subject weakness turns out to be a skill weakness that is costing you marks in three places.
2. Do Professional Responsibility early, especially if you are writing both papers. It is the one piece of work that pays twice.
3. Measure before you allocate. Almost every candidate we work with is wrong about at least one of their own weakest areas, and usually confidently wrong.

That last one is not a sales pitch, it is the most consistent thing we see. It is also the reason our Barrister mock exams produce a report cut by both area of law and competency, plus the cross-section between them, rather than a list of percentages.

The short version

• Civil Litigation, Criminal Law, Family Law, Public Law, with Professional Responsibility throughout.
• 160 questions, 4.5 hours, open book, print only.
• Four options, one best answer, no "all of the above".
• Questions are written against seven published competency headings, and your weaknesses follow competencies more often than subjects.
• Questions derive from the Law Society's materials for that licensing year, updated annually.