A method and system for acquiring multiple software locks in bulk is disclosed. When multiple locks need to be acquired, such as for atomic transactions in transactional memory systems, the disclosed techniques may be applied to consolidate computationally expensive memory barrier operations across the lock acquisitions. A system may acquire multiple locks in bulk, at least in part, by modifying values in one or more fields of multiple locks and by then performing a memory barrier operation to ensure that the modified values in the multiple locks are visible to other application threads. The technique may be repeated for locks that the system fails to acquire during earlier iterations until all required locks are acquired. The described technique may be applied to various scenarios including static and/or dynamic transactional locking protocols.