Hi everyone, I'm sorry for taking things slightly off-topic, but I'm hoping that this group of folks might have some pertinent advice.
I've just started law school (in the midst of week two) and I'm looking for a better way to take and organize both class notes and case briefs. I've been using openoffice writer so far, but I'm not very confident that managing disparate odt files is going to serve me well when finals crunch-time rolls around. My primary goal is to facilitate a birds-eye, interconnected view of all the case law I've read and analyzed over the course of the semester, without tracking hundreds of odt files. For example, it would be nice to be able to pull out just the holdings/rules from all of my briefs that relate to the consideration doctrine in contracts, without the distraction of extraneous details, which are needed for class. A secondary (and somewhat less important) goal is the ability to cross-reference class discussion notes with relevant briefs. I suppose an XML-based or RDBMS-backed solution could help in this regard. Other nice-to-have features I've considered: a non-distracting and simple interface (OOo is horrible in this regard), revision control (svn compatibility at least), offline accessibility (with online backup), indexing/search, tagging. I've seen a couple of instances of docbook briefs and notes online, but I'm not sure if docbook is sufficient for my needs. It would certainly meet some of my goals better than OOo, but I don't really want to be distracted by markup while I'm trying to brief a case or take notes in class. Maybe a good docbook WYSIWYG editor? So, for any of you who are recent law school grads or students, how would you keep track of your notes and briefs in a way that allows for detailed class preparation and easy studying at the end of the semester? Any ideas? Should I just suck it up and use a word processor like all of my classmates? Is there some hidden magic I can do to leverage open document's XML format to meet my goals? Or should I resort to Vim or Emacs? I'd love to hear some open source law school success stories! Thanks, -C- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
