The Mac Law Student’s Basic Software Arsenal

The fall semester fast approaches. If you haven’t already assembled your law school software arsenal, it is useful to think of your software requirements in categories. The apps listed below were selected on the basis of my own experience, plus comments and reviews from other MLS contributors. Obviously there are other choices available. If you feel an app that really should be in every Mac law student’s laptop has been overlooked, please politely let us all know in a comment.

Reviews linked to in this article will usually make note of student pricing. Also remember the Apple student discount. Your university store may also provide deep discounts on some software packages.

Make Your Mac More Efficient

• A small cult has grown around an application called Quicksilver. It is a difficult app to explain, because it does so much. But even if you only use it as an application launcher, you’ll soon wonder how you lived without it. Check out my intro to Quicksilver, then go download this amazing free app.
• I’ve only recently been introduced to TypeIt4Me, but I’m already a big fan. Mark Fisher’s TypeIt4Me review lays out in detail why this keystroke-saving app is so useful.

Manage Your Time and Tasks

Law school places enormous demands on your time. If you want to get all of your work done and have time for anything outside of study, time management is essential. Although I have been using the Kinkless system for the past couple of years (and wrote about it), lately I’ve been testing both iGTD and alpha builds of OmniFocus, and I find both superior to Kinkless.

• iGTD – This full-featured task-management software is easy to learn, flexible, and very capable. A full review of iGTD should be coming to Mac Law Students soon.
• Journler – Many Mac users swear by Journler as a way to keep track of their lives. Built around a calendar metaphor, it provides extensive integration with Apple’s iApps. My January review of Journler focused on its uses as a journal, but many people use it to do much more.
• OmniFocus – The long-awaited successor to Kinkless is still under development, but it looks very promising. If we’re lucky, OmniGroup will release OmniFocus in time before classes start, but I’m not banking on it.

Take Notes

There are no shortage of options for note-taking on the Mac. I encourage you to experiment with a few before deciding which one you want to use. You’ll be taking a lot of notes, so the more comfortable you are with the software, the better.

• OmniOutliner comes bundled with MacBooks and MacBook Pros. It is designed specifically for note-taking, and it focuses on that task. OmniOutliner Pro includes a few more capabilities and is useful for more than just note taking. Here’s how I use OmniOutliner Pro. Here are some OOP template files.
• Mori proves that OmniOutliner isn’t the only game in town, as MLS contributor Kaitilin’s introduction to Mori demonstrates.
• Circus Ponies NoteBook also has a strong following due to its range of capabilities and flexibility. Scott’s review of NoteBook shows off what it can do.
• NoteTaker from AquaMinds hasn’t been reviewed in Mac Law Students, but it has been around for some time and is quite versatile.
• OmniGraffle is an excellent tool for diagramming and flowcharting. The Pro version provides some extra capabilities but the base version is quite capable. Here are a couple of example/template files for OmniGraffle Pro.
• If you are thinking of taking audio notes, check out Shaw’s review of iListen.

Conduct Online Research

Most law schools provide free access to both LexisNexus and Westlaw. The research services have their differences, including how well they support Mac browsers. But online research services are just the start. When researching for a legal writing assignment or paper, a strategy for dealing with PDFs of your research materials can save a lot of time and hassle.

• There are more Mac web browsers than you might think. Beyond Safari and Firefox, Camino, Flock, iCab, OmniWeb, Opera, and Shiira are all out there waiting to be used. Check out this Mac browser review to see how they stack up, and how well LexisNexus and Westlaw work with Mac browsers.
• If you’re not already using RSS feeds in a big way, you may find them an enormous time-saver in law school. Poking around through websites and wasting time with TV news just doesn’t cut it. See this review of NetNewsWire, Shaw’s review of RSS Menu, and this post about feed readers and aggregators for more info.
• Online bookmarking services like del.icio.us, can be very helpful. They’re a fast, flexible, free way to manage info you find online. Example: When I come across something I may want to incorporate into an article in Tech LawForum, the online law journal I write for, I tag it “forTLF”. No hunting for URL snippets later – it’s all in del.icio.us.
• Yep really helped me when I was conducting research for a paper class last fall. I had dozens and dozens of articles from the Web, and managing them and making the contents searchable would have been a pain in the neck. But as my Yep review points out, this PDF-focused application proved quite helpful.
• Skim is an Open Source (BSD license) PDF reader and note taker for OS X. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but although it is a newcomer, it does look promising.

Keep Track of Information

Storing the endless snippets of important information that comes your way during the application process, obtaining of student loans, and day to day existence in law school can be frustrating. There are several Mac apps designed specifically to make this all much easier. I reviewed four information management apps (DEVONThink, KIT, SOHO Notes, and Yojimbo), and earlier I reviewed Yojimbo alone.

Note that some of these apps, DEVONThink and SOHO Notes in particular, do double duty as note-taking tools. Whether you prefer the monolithic approach (one app does many things) or the “sharp tool” approach (each app focuses on one primary type of function), is something you should keep in mind as you read these reviews.

Write

Whether its your first year writing class, your paper class, or work you’re doing for a law journal, flexible word processing tools can make a big difference.

• WriteRoom sounds a bit odd. The whole point of the app is to dumb down word processing. But this focus allows you to get your words into the computer with an absolute minimum of fuss. While Microsoft Word is always guessing for you, trying to format your text, and generally getting in the way, WriteRoom is much better for first-stage writing, when you don’t need those things. See this WriteRoom review for more details.
• TextEdit comes with your Mac, and it does more than you might think. It can easily import simply-formatted MS Word .doc documents, and it can export to .doc as well. TextEdit is lightweight, it fires up fast, and it doesn’t get in your way.
• Pages is part of the iWork bundle from Apple. It imports from and exports to the MS Word .doc format. Pages is not actually targeted at Word; it is really best understood as a replacement for basic page layout applications (like the old PageMaker, or Microsoft Publisher). Still, it strips away layers and layers of Word bloat and leaves you with the word processing features (pagination, footnotes, multiple columns, table inserts) that you’ll use most often.
• Microsoft Word is the de facto standard in word publishing, and more than likely anything you receive from your writing instructors and other professors will be in Word’s .doc format. It is handy to have on hand just in case. I’m still using Microsoft Office X (released back in early 2002) and I’ve never had a problem opening Word docs sent to me by Windows users.
• There are several alternatives to MS Word, including Mariner Write, Neo Office (a port of OpenOffice designed specifically for Mac OS X, and Nisus Writer.

Back Up Your Data

Macs are solid machines, but the Achilles Heel of any computer is its hard drive. If that goes, so does your data. Thankfully these days there are a variety of ways to back up your important data.

• I realize this is a hardware intrusion into a software discussion, but it is an important enough subject that I feel compelled to break protocol. Get an external drive and store your home directory on it. It is worth spending a bit extra to get a solid drive, and it is definitely worth backing up regularly. I’m partial to LaCie drives and the SuperDuper! backup utility, but those certainly aren’t the only highly-rated options available.
• Online backup services such as Mozy are handy for backing up the essentials (like the folder with all of your law school documents in it). Online backup services usually have a free and a pay version, depending on how much space you need. Backing up to a hard drive and to an online backup service may seem a bit fanatical, but it wouldn’t hurt, either.

Keep In Touch

Email and instant messaging are so common that most of us don’t even think about the available options, but Mail.app and whatever client your IM service uses aren’t the only options.

• Apple’s Mail application works pretty well, but if you want to trick it out, see Hawk Wings, a site dedicated specifically to helping people get the most out of Mail.
• Thunderbird is to email as Firefox is to web browsing. Free, fast, and flexible.
• Adium is a free app that lets you connect to multiple instant messaging networks (AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and others) through one client interface.
• DropSend and YouSendIt let you send monster-sized email attachments as links, rather than files. I wish more professors were aware of these services, because they really make life easier for recipients. Both services offer free and paid versions, depending on the number and size of attachments you send.

Conclusion

There are so many helpful apps out there for Mac-using students that it can be difficult to keep them all straight. But if you think first about what it is you want software to do for you, it will make it easier to sift through the choices and find what works for your particular needs. To see which specific applications I use, check out the Erik’s setup page (note that for Time/Task Management I no longer use Kinkless).