Note-taking in law school

About three weeks ago, I became the proud owner of a new 13.3-inch MacBook Pro.  Although the transition has been a little frustrating (“control” functions are now “command” functions, what?!), I am very happy with my purchase.

I bought my law school laptop two months before law school because I wanted to give myself time to get used to everything.  Like I said, switching from PCs to Macs is frustrating, and I’d rather be frustrated now than after class starts.  Anyway, I downloaded Microsoft Office 2008 and began migrating my files, exploring a bit to get used to the new format (yes, even Office is slightly different on Macs).  After I got the hang of it, I figured I was pretty much “law school ready” in terms of technology.

Wrong.  Apparently, note-taking in law school is an art form, and Word simply doesn’t cut it anymore.  And Mark Fisher of Mac Law Students is certainly not the first person to tout the benefits of using special note-taking software (just visit the TLS forums…)  So, in true overachiever fashion, I downloaded trials versions of two of the most popular Mac note-taking programs and gave each a whirl.

OmniOutliner*, recommended by Mr. Fisher, is a decent product.  There are several features that are not available in Word – for example, there is a table of contents type menu that makes it easy to switch from one subject to the next within a single document, and outside documents of almost any format can be embedded within an OO outline.  But its pitfall is that the print format is difficult to adjust and exporting outside of OO loses formatting altogether.  So when finals time rolls around, and I need to build a condensed outline that will fit my size constraints, OO is not the product I want to use.

Circus Ponies Notebook*, recommended by many TLS users, boasts quite a few more features than both Word and OmniOutliner.  But I found most of them to be unnecessary and confusing.  I am not a big fan of clutter, and note-taking via Notebook is sure to be a massive hodgepodge of post-it notes, color-coded tabs, and other extraneous items.  And the features that should be easy, such as tabbing out or highlighting, are actually somewhat annoying and/or counterintuitive.

In the end, I decided that my note-taking strategy will consist of three Word documents per class.  One document will contain case briefs, which I will do until I discover for myself that they are unnecessary (as I’m sure I will).  One document will contain notes, in outline format, based on readings and class discussion.  Then, when crunch time nears, I will reorganize my notes into a third document:  a condensed finals outline.  And Microsoft Word will be 100% acceptable for all of this.  And I will not be any worse off than the nerds with ridiculous OneNote documents cluttered by sound bytes and tabs and indices (no offense to anyone planning on doing this – we are indeed all nerds).  I mean, I survived undergrad with just pencil and paper, and it wasn’t that long ago.

* Disclaimer:  I tried both OmniOutliner and Circus Ponies Notebook for approximately one hour each.  I do not purport to know anything about them, and could very likely be 100% wrong in my judgement.