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April 28, 2006
OmniOutliner for Law Students
Three years ago, before setting out for SLS, I did a bit of gearing up. I bought a then-new 12" PowerBook G4 (still rollin’), an extra power adaptor, Office v.X—the basics. But without a doubt the most crucial purchase was OmniGroup’s fantastic OmniOutliner. I had used OO before, in my work at CDT, but it was in academia that OO really became a standout. If you are a law student and you use a Mac, you owe it to yourself to get this program.
Of course, there’s no shortage of praise for OmniOutliner, and all the other outliners for OS X, out there, most notably Ted Goranson’s unbelievably-exhaustive About This Particular Outliner. This note, then, is addressed to current/future law students looking for a note-taking/outlining system.
In my experience most law students instinctively embrace outline-based note taking. This is because the outline format preserves structure; when used properly it comprises not only what the professor said, but the path taken to get there. Preserving structure is tremendously important when it comes time to build an outline in preparation for finals. If I’ve taken good notes, and I’ve used outline form, I have a record of how the course material is structured in the professor’s mind. In my experience, 60–70% of succeeding in law school is developing a structured understanding of how the pieces fit together, and it’s a far easier journey when you’ve got a map of how one other smart person brought it all together.
OmniOutliner is extremely good at this structure-preservation, better than anything else I’ve used. It’s true that Word can make outlines, and it even has a (little-used) Outline Mode and, on OS X, there’s (even-less-used) Notebook Mode. Either are better than nothing, but neither is great. Outline Mode is designed to help you structure large documents using Styles, and it actually works pretty well once you’ve got a set of styles you can live with (the defaults are unusably horrendous). But because it’s designed with Word’s WYSIWYG document philosophy1 in mind, users spend far too much time futzing with font sizes, indents, tabs, etc., and that’s distracting. Notebook Mode was made part of Word when Office 2004 hit, and by that time I was firmly esconced in OmniOutliner. It might be great, but after a few minutes with it I found its “Just Like A Paper Notebook” paradigm frustrating. My $2,400 computer owes me better than to replicate paper.
OmniOutliner, on the other hand, is a structure machine that encourages you to stop thinking about what your notes will look like when you print them out, and think about their content instead. Using it properly is like entering thoughts into a high-end database with a whole variety of ways to view, output, print, and manipulate them later on. It’s easy and intuitive to collapse parts of the outline to get a sense of the big picture, or to expand it rapidly for detail. Like Word, OmniOutliner offers some text styling capabilities; I use them to highlight text, mark citations, or note that this part of the notes is a direct quotation from some case, statute, or treaty. It’s also fast, highly usable, pleasant to look at and fully-documented.
It goes without saying that OmniOutliner is very good at the other important academic activity for law students, outlining. All the points I made about structure above come in here too.
I strongly recommend downloading OmniOutliner and checking it out. To see what I’m talking about, I’ve uploaded an archive of my notes for Trademark last term and the outline I studied from.2 This is what worked for me; it might or might not work for you. If you’re a law student or a lawyer and you find errors in either, please remember that the notes are exactly that—raw and unrefined—and the outline was only one part of my study process; I actually did fairly well in Trademark.
1 If you’ve got some time to burn, check this time-honored rant against WYSIWYG generally, and Word particularly.
2 The notes and outline are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.
Posted by Rob Courtney at April 28, 2006 12:46 PM
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