[blindlaw] Software for organizing law school notes

[Will Miller]

Hey Everett, I'm a rising 2L at Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, NC, and a 
member of the BlindJD09 group. . Like Mr. Vendeland, I just used Microsoft 
products to organize my notes. The most important thing for me to stay 
organized was to develop and follow a technique for naming folders and 
files. It probably sounds basic, but it is really important because you will 
want to be able to find topic-specific notes and materials quickly.
During the first semester, I created folders for each course and nested one 
big subfolder named "class notes" in each. I Created files for each day in 
class with a name like "9-13 ClassNotes _Contracts", identifying the name of 
the file by the date. This proved to be a poor naming convention during 
exams because I spent too much time hunting for my notes on particular 
topics that we had covered in class.
So I changed my strategy for the second semester, using more subfolders with 
topic-specific names. I gave the top-level folder the name of the course 
(Contracts 2, for example), and named subfolders by topics (you can find the 
topic names in a syllabus or the table of contents in your casebook). So, 
for example, I named one subfolder that corresponded to chapter 10 of the 
casebook "10 _Consequences of Nonperformance", with subfolders for each of 
the subtopics in the chapter ("anticipatory repudiation", "express 
conditions", and "material breach"). Then I named each days notes for the 
date. So the file path for my notes on March 7 was "Contracts 2/ 10 
_Consequences of Nonperformance/ Express Conditions/ 3-7 ClassNotes 
_Contracts 2.doc".
I am sure there are other equally-effective and more efficient naming 
conventions, but this worked pretty well for me. The most important thing is 
to have an effective plan to organize your notes, briefs, handouts, etc. 
Also, don't feel like you need to buy a bunch of commercial products for 
organization, access to case briefs, etc. You have already paid a pretty 
penny for microsoft's organizational system, and you will have free access 
to cases, briefs, and much, much more on Westlaw and Lexis Nexis while you 
are in school.
congratulations on your admittance to law school, and good luck with 1L and 
beyond.

Will Miller


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "E.J. Zufelt" <everett at zufelt.ca>
To: "NFBnet Blind Law Mailing List" <blindlaw at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2007 4:23 PM
Subject: [blindlaw] Software for organizing law school notes


> Good afternoon,
>
> I will be entering the first year of law school in September and am
> wondering if anyone can share suggestions for what software they use(d) to
> organize their law school notes and, how accessible the software is and 
> how
> they felt about the experience overall.
>
> Thanks,
> Everett
>
>
>
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