Study Guides for Law Student Success

"Law classes require different strategies than undergraduate classes because of format, content, and pace differences. Law professors rarely lecture because they expect students to understand basic concepts during class preparation. They may use the Socratic Method of questioning to reveal legal analysis and nuances. Professors also tend to cover more material quickly."

Contains useful suggestions when starting to take notes by hand.

2010 The Writing Center at GULC.

Taking notes is a crucial skill for law students. In law school, your notes are your record of what was covered by your professor. They offer your professor’s perspective, which is unavailable in any commercial outline, and they will be one of your primary sources for studying for your exams. Effective note taking can help you discover not only what your professor finds significant and what is likely to be on the exam, but also the larger, primary themes and issues of the course. This outline provides tips and techniques that may be useful for taking notes in your classes at the Law Center.

"As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way."

"Students who used longhand remembered more and had a deeper understanding of the material."

"Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks — research shows that taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science."

"A new study concludes that law students who use laptops in class do as well as those don't use computers—as long as professors put the kibosh on Facebook and the like."

Jan 18, 2018 By Karen Sloan

"If your note-taking skills are suffering from summertime rigor mortis, now's as good a time as any to throw a new technique into the mix. Let's take a look at some new and old tools for improving your ballpoint repertoire."

From Law Practice Today. The Monthly Webzine of the ABA Law Practice Division.

From Learning Fundamentals. Anything that I was required to learn at university, I had to mind map. Why? Because rote learning no longer worked at Law school...."For my legal units I had to really understand the information and mind mapping it all out allowed me to do this."