Mac Law Students

Collapsing is of the reasons I use OmniOutliner wherever possible, and always when I’m taking notes. I found collapsing particularly useful as a 1L, when every case seemed to incorporate an endless array of rules. Once you go three or four levels deep in an outline, it can be difficult to keep track of what is going on. The collapsing capability in OmniOutliner makes it easy to collapse a segment of your notes, secure in the knowledge that all of the subordinate elements are in place.

While this is a welcome capability, it actually takes some practice to exploit to full advantage. Breaking apart statutes and judicially-created tests can get complex, but when you don’t have to worry about how many levels deep your outline will go, the structure itself becomes your friend. One of the reasons I like to expand statutory language and judicially-created tests in this fashion is that, like the sentence diagramming I did in 7th grade, it illuminates the relationship between the elements.

Doubtless other note-taking applications share OmniOutliner’s ability to collapse text. If you’re still using a word processor to take notes, you may want to give a dedicated note-taking app a try. In law school you live in whatever app you use to take notes, so it’s worth having a tool that gives you maximum note-taking power.

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