A review plan is not a reading list. It is a decision about what you will be able to do on 5, 8 and 12 September 2027, made twelve months earlier and revised every month. This is a plan for the 2027 Examinations that starts from the examination's own structure — six subjects, fixed weights, twenty problems per subject — and works backwards.
The two facts the plan is built on
The weights are not equal. Each subject carries a fixed share of the weighted general average:
| Day | Sitting | Subject | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 — 5 Sept 2027 | Morning | Political and Public International Law | 15% |
| 1 — 5 Sept 2027 | Afternoon | Commercial and Taxation Laws | 20% |
| 2 — 8 Sept 2027 | Morning | Civil Law and Land Titles and Deeds | 20% |
| 2 — 8 Sept 2027 | Afternoon | Labor Law and Social Legislation | 10% |
| 3 — 12 Sept 2027 | Morning | Criminal Law | 10% |
| 3 — 12 Sept 2027 | Afternoon | Remedial Law and Legal and Judicial Ethics, with Practical Exercises | 25% |
A pass is a weighted general average of 75%. Twenty-five per cent of that number is one sitting on the last afternoon. Ten per cent is another. Any plan that spends equal hours on every subject has already decided to underweight a quarter of its own result.
The cut-off is 30 June 2026. Laws in force and jurisprudence promulgated as of that date are what the examination covers. Nothing decided afterwards is examinable. This is liberating: from July 2026 onwards you are not chasing new cases, you are consolidating a closed body of law.
The shape of the year
The plan below assumes a review year running from October 2026 to September 2027, with roughly three to five hours a day available on weekdays and more at weekends. Scale the hours, keep the order.
Phase 1 — October to December 2026: the heavy half
Two subjects dominate by weight and by volume: Remedial Law with Ethics (25%) and the pair of Civil Law with Land Titles (20%) and Commercial with Taxation (20%).
- October–November: Remedial Law. Start here, not with Civil Law. It is the heaviest single weight, it is the subject most candidates under-prepare because it feels procedural rather than doctrinal, and its vocabulary (jurisdiction, remedies, provisional remedies, evidence) reappears in Civil and Criminal answers. Build the map of the Rules of Court in order: jurisdiction, civil procedure from complaint to judgment, then provisional remedies, then special proceedings, then evidence.
- December: Legal and Judicial Ethics. Taught with Remedial in the same sitting, and small enough to finish. The Code of Professional Responsibility and Accountability, the Notarial Rules, the Rules on disqualified lawyers and judges — this is a subject where the text is short and the marks are cheap, which is exactly the sort of subject candidates postpone and then regret.
Deliverable by 31 December: a working outline of Remedial Law you can rebuild from memory, and every Ethics provision read at least twice.
Phase 2 — January to March 2027: the doctrinal middle
- January–February: Civil Law, including Land Titles and Deeds. Persons and family relations, property, obligations and contracts, succession. Land Titles sits in the same sitting and is small; read it as an application of property, not as a separate subject.
- March: Commercial and Taxation Laws. Half the sitting is taxation, half is commercial. Do not treat tax as optional because it is arithmetic-looking: it is examined as doctrine (what is income, when is it taxable, who is the taxpayer) and the marks are not partial-credit-friendly if you cannot state the rule.
Deliverable by 31 March: an outline and a set of one-page "tests" for each — the doctrine in a sentence, then its exception, then one paragraph applying it.
Phase 3 — April to June 2027: the rest, and the first full papers
- April: Political and Public International Law (15%). Constitutional structure, the three powers, rights, and the international law component candidates routinely skip.
- May: Criminal Law (10%). Two books of the Revised Penal Code, plus special penal laws as the syllabus names them. Small weight, high yield: the Code is finite.
- June: Labor Law and Social Legislation (10%). Also finite. The Labor Code plus the jurisprudence on dismissal, money claims and jurisdiction.
This phase is where timed writing starts in earnest. From April, one full twenty-problem paper per month, on a Sunday morning, under the clock. Mark it against suggested answers and record what you missed — not a score, a list.
Phase 4 — July to early August 2027: consolidation, not coverage
No new material. This is the hardest instruction in the plan to follow and the most valuable.
- Rebuild every subject's outline from memory, one subject per week, and repair only what fails.
- One full paper per week, alternating subjects, always at a real sitting's times of day.
- Fix the answer format until it is boring: the conclusion first, the rule stated precisely, the application to the facts, the conclusion restated.
- Work the digests of the cases you keep mistaking for each other.
Phase 5 — the last two weeks
The pre-week is not for learning. It is for stabilising.
- No new topics, no new books, no borrowed outlines.
- Two hours a day of retrieval on the material you have flagged, and one timed answer a day.
- Sleep on a schedule that matches the examination's: 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. starts.
- Read the examination's own instructions for the year, once, slowly — the format and the platform rules, not the law.
Time, allocated by weight
If you have 1,000 hours of review, weight alone says something like this:
| Subject | Weight | Share of study hours |
|---|---|---|
| Remedial Law and Ethics | 25% | 250 |
| Civil Law and Land Titles | 20% | 200 |
| Commercial and Taxation | 20% | 200 |
| Political and Public International Law | 15% | 150 |
| Labor Law and Social Legislation | 10% | 100 |
| Criminal Law | 10% | 100 |
Adjust for what you already know. If you were strong in Remedial Law in law school, do not spend 250 hours proving it; move 60 of them to your weakest subject. Weight is where the marks are, not where your time must go.
The one allocation not in that table is retrieval, and it is not optional: 20 minutes a day, every day, on material from the previous week and the previous month.
What each month must produce
A plan without deliverables drifts. At the end of each month you should be able to point at three things:
- A map of the subject studied, in your own words, rebuildable from memory.
- A list of the things you got wrong, dated, with the ones now fixed crossed out.
- At least one timed answer you wrote to a question in that subject, marked against a reference answer, with a note on what was missing.
If a month produces none of these, the month did not happen — regardless of how many pages were turned.
When the plan breaks
It will break. Two repairs matter more than replanning:
- Compress coverage, never the retrieval or the writing. If a week goes, take it out of new reading. The exam tests what you can produce, so protect the producing.
- Compress from the edges of a subject, not its middle. The topics named in the syllabus are the ones to keep; the interesting digression you found in a textbook is the one to drop.
Then resume the plan where it is, not where it would have been in an ideal year. A plan resumed honestly in week eight is worth more than a plan restarted in week one four times.
Where the material is
The 2027 coverage map lists the syllabus topic by topic with the lecture that teaches each one, which is the fastest way to see what a subject contains before you allocate hours to it. The library holds every decision and statute the syllabus cites, and the 2027 examination page sets out the schedule, weights and cut-off date in one place.
Finally: this is a plan, not a promise. The examination is a closed body of law and a fixed format; whether you pass depends on what you can produce on the day, and the only way to know that is to practise producing it before the day arrives.