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Best law school note taking software mac

Just pick one and see how it goes. Then swap over and see what happens. Cost is another factor. I started with a pen and paper notebook. I can still recall how sore my hand was after an hour of solid writing after those first few lectures!

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I moved onto a laptop, and instead of actually listening to what important cases and concepts the lecturers were focusing on, I sat there and tried to transcribe the every word that was spoken. Honestly, at the end of the semester you will be preparing for the exams by using the notes you took when studying, not from your lectures. Its easy to take notes during class because it creates bullet points whenever you indent, and its nice for outlining because you can just chunk your notes into an outline without formatting issues. During lecture, I highlight information that's already in my reading notes whenever the professor discusses it and I color code new information in blue font.

For questions or things I'm unsure about, I code it in red font. That way it's easy for me to distinguish where the different pieces of information came from when I'm putting an outline together. If you want to handwrite notes or your professor bans laptops I would recommend Levenger think-pads if you can spare the cash. I've found they make it easier to stay organized because they have little boxes at the top for you to enter the date, topic, and page number for all your notes. They also have a blank space on the left margin for cornell note taking if that's your jam also nice for drawing charts or things like that.

At least half of my 1L profs didn't allow laptops.


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I think pen and paper was the most common note-taking device during 1L. In any case, your choice of note-taking app will likely have minimal effect on your performance, particularly because many of them have fairly similar features. Just try out a few different ones now, see which you like, and stick with it. Evernote requires internet access to not glitch up, and everyone I know who used it says templates are more or less mandatory.

I'm sure you've probably found one by now, but if you haven't and I get a lot of shit for this , for outlining and even note-taking in class , I think Pages is the most user friendly. It's simple, clean, and doesn't include all of the formatting options right in your face like MS Word does.

No matter what program you use though, save your own templates. You'll be especially thankful once finals come around and you don't have to format every single outline from scratch. I am an undergrad in engineering, but I think that notetaking is the same, particularly in classes not involving equations. I use pen and ink in a spiral notebook.

That part is old fashioned, of course. But after class I take a picture of my notes using my smart phone. I use the app Adobe Scan free to save the notes in. That is then saved on my computer, which is, of course, backed up. A good study technique good for me, at least is to look at the pdf of my handwritten notes and type them up I use Word, anything will work OK. That help my memory and is searchable,. I also take pictures of the classroom white board at the end of class and save the pdf files with my notes. Evernote has less in-depth hierarchical organization only has notebooks and tags , while Bear is very minimalistic and only uses hashtags for organization but supports markdown if you're into that!

Hand writing. Type the necessary notes after into your outline. Just hypos for the same rule. I use OneNote and I think it's great, especially for law school. You could try OmniOutliner , but I actually ended up switching back to OneNote after a week of using it.

Or course there are those who love Evernote.

Life Hacker has a "showdown" comparison. In this case Evernote won! There are dozens of small considerations in the construction of OneNote that make using it more efficient and pleasant. Users can tag their notes with a large list of included tags or customize the tags to better suit their own needs and style. You can zip appointments, tasks, and contacts over to Outlook with a single mouse click. While reviewing lecture notes, if you notice that something in your notes is actually a task you need to get taken care of, you can flag it as a task both in OneNote and Outlook with no hassle.

OneNote has built in OCR optical character recognition , which means that you can scan documents or take photographs of text and OneNote will automatically index the text in the photographs and allow you to copy and search it. I tested the OCR with business cards, literature handouts, and even the back of a toothbrush package.

Best note taking app for Mac? : LawSchool

OneNote grabbed the text off all of them with minimal recognition errors. Less complex is better for me. It focuses your mind when you have to be selective about what you write down because you can only write so fast. I will likely be getting a Macbook though before classes start, so I may have to find something for Mac.

Any ideas for the Mac, folks? NoteBook helps you create a smooth and seamless presentation at trial by helping you stay organized. NoteBook is the most trusted organizing software available on the Mac. Organize your whole trial in NoteBook. Compose your opening and closing statements. Create a page for each witness' direct or cross.

Apps to Make Your Life Easier in and Outside of Law School

Link questions to exhibits pages for instant access. Integrate images, charts, even video deposition snippets directly into your notes. NoteBook makes it easy to concentrate on what you need to present, rather than on how you should present it. I've been using OneNote to make an itinerary for my upcoming trip and it is absolutely phenomenal. The search feature, subpages, the ease of making lists and so much more make it the superior note-taking program. LEEWS split column method.

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Found OneNote and all those programs unnecessary. It's such a personal preference, just like studying.