Should I bind my study materials?

One piece of advice you might have come across in your bar exam preparation relates to binding your study materials. By “binding”, we mean taking your study materials into a print shop and having the staff organize them so that they essentially amount to a mini book. You would do this for each chapter of study materials.

One of the biggest advantages of binding your materials is efficiency. As opposed to having one giant stack of papers, binding each chapter separately allows you to consult a more nimble document when faced with a particular set of questions. For example, if you were faced with a set of questions relating to family law, you could simply consult your bound set of pages relating to that specific area. This is much more efficient than having to navigate a single document consisting of hundreds of pages relating to ALL areas of law.

One of the biggest disadvantages to binding your materials is cost. If you opt to use an index, chances are you are already going to have to dish out a significant chunk of change to have your index printed. Add binding to this, and you can quickly find yourself spending several hundreds of dollars on your bar prep (in addition to the fees you are already required to pay the Law Society of Ontario).

One alternative to binding is to just hole punch your materials and then insert them into a three-ringed binder. A lot of students opt to take this approach (in fact, we did too!). It still provides you with an efficient way to navigate your materials, but at a much cheaper cost. One risk, however, is that you end up tearing your pages while trying to flip through them during the actual bar exam. Notwithstanding this risk, for students on a budget, placing your materials into a binder is probably the most prudent approach!