Tips for Law Students and New Lawyers

Matt Homann, of the [non]billable hour is guest blogging at Notes from the (Legal) Underground and offers us Five Indispensable Tips for Law Students and New Lawyers.

It's chock full of great technology advice and I agree with much of what he says. Personally, I would also add:

1. Try a Tablet PC before you buy one. Although Matt is up on them, I had the opportunity to try one out, and I just didn't think it was all that spectacular. You pay a premium for the technology, and personally, I would wait until it gets better.

2. Outliners are your friend. Even if you don't use CaseMap/NoteMap, do find yourself an outliner that you like and are comfortable with. I see many of my classmates taking notes in Word, and I wonder how they can keep their notes organized in a way that is intuitive without slitting their wrists in the process.

I've actually been using a really awesome little tool called WikiPad for my note taking and briefing. It lets me organize my class notes, case briefs and outlining all in one place, and in a way that makes sense to me, and that's the most important thing: organization tools don't do any good if you don't like them and use them.

3. Learn the power of the PDF. Ernie the Attorney has another blog, called PDF for Lawyers, which unfortunately, doesn't get updated nearly often enough. Acrobat is an amazing tool for electronic document management (my wife, a practicing attorney, is a PDF whiz who uses them for all kinds of filings, forms, etc.). Use it!