Reviews for 1L: Outliners

There are several products marketed towards the law student, designed to make you more productive in note taking, outlining, briefing, etc. There are three products that I looked at for this exercise, all are “outliners” if we use that term liberally. For this review, I looked at StoreLaw Outliner, Juristudents, and NoteMap.

First, a note about outliners in general. Some people really don’t really like outliners, and to be honest, I used to be one of those people. That’s because I really didn’t have any projects that required it. Generally speaking, whenever I would outline something, I was fine using Word, just cutting and pasting points around. For small outlines, that might be just fine. But on the whole, when I started working on larger outlines, I found it began to be really inefficient. Here are some features I think are key to a decent outliner:

• The ability to easily, on the fly, create new outline nodes
• The ability to easily reformat the outline (I, II, III, A, B, C, etc.)
• The ability to easily reorder the outline (grab nodes, and just drag and drop them into new positions).

First up is StoreLaw Outliner, an outliner/note organizer from the legal powerhouse, Thompson West. The price is decent; you can pick it up for around $65. I think that’s the cheapest thing you will ever buy from West, so maybe you’d better take advantage of it. The first problem with the StoreLaw Outliner is, well, it’s not much of an outliner. You can create your own outlines, but it’s really cumbersome to do so. Want to create a new topic, you right click, select new topic and then you get a pop-up. Way to break concentration and flow. Oh yeah, and grab something and try to move it. You can, but it’s not nice. You get no indication of where you are in the outline, just a little hand, and the program is pretty slow and not very responsive. You can use up and down arrows on the toolbar, but forget power outlining. For creating your own outlines, StoreLaw scores a big fat zero.

However, StoreLaw is from West, so you should expect something, right? Well, they provide a number of “pre-fab” outlines, based on the common textbooks for any given subject. Use the Prosser text for Torts? No problem! Just load up the West outline and you’re good to go! Unless, um, your professor jumps out of order, or skips a section, and now you’re back to trying to drag things around.

Now, because StoreLaw is geared towards students, it does have a nice feature, which allows you to keep notes organized. When you are in an outline, you can have tabs for case brief, class notes, key points, and secondary source notes. Those extra notes sections are associated with the outline node, so if you do manage to drag it someplace useful, your notes follow.

You can also export your notes, and the outline to Word, which is nice for printing, or um, probably something else.

Overall, I find StoreLaw to be slow and annoying. However, if you really dig on pre-canned outlines, this might be the right product for you. I have a Criminal professor who uses his own course packet, and a Torts professor who has his own order to Prosser, so it’s not as useful to me. Coupled with the shortcomings of the outliner, I don’t think much of StoreLaw. Rating: One Gavel.

Next up, we have another “for law students” product called Juristudents. Like StoreLaw, Juristudents is reasonably priced at $49 and comes to us from an (obviously) smaller company called Stare Decisis. Juristudents scores some major bonus points for being cross-platform. Yes, 98% of all law firms use PCs, and the vast majority of law students are going to work for law firms. But hey, props to the Mac users, they deserve good software too.

As an outliner, Juristudents suffers from many of the same problems that StoreLaw Outliner has, but takes them one level further. Creating new topics in the outline with Juristudents also involves the popups (hmmm, someone’s using a bad tree control for their outlines), and I couldn’t find any way to rearrange topics in the outline.
Juristudents does allow you to insert case briefs and statutes into your outline, and view them in conjunction with your class notes, which is nice. It’s more limited than the pane viewing found in StoreLaw, but like StoreLaw, it will also allow you to export your outline to Word, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Overall, Juristudents shows promise, but it is still a little rough around the edges. The get big bonus points for being cross platform, but I think I’ll wait for the next version. Rating: One-and-a-half Gavels.

Finally, we have NoteMap from CaseSoft. CaseSoft is a maker of software for lawyers, not students, so this one carries a lawyer price tag at $149. Yipes! However, NoteMap is the only one of the three that is a real outliner. You can create outlines very quickly and easily, no popups to create new topics, subtopics, etc. Just type. In this respect, NoteMap is far superior from an organizational standpoint. You can reorder nodes just by dragging them, and NoteMap has some grey lines that indicate where you are in the overall outline, which is nice if you outline goes fairly deep. You can also mark nodes in your outline, and attach comment “sticky notes” to topics as well. The default style for outlines (fonts, etc.) are, well, ugly, but you can easily change those.

What NoteMap lacks is the multipane viewing for classnotes and case briefs. Personally, I take my class notes directly in NoteMap, because it allows for a natural flow and easy re-ordering. It also has a feature that allows you to link a file to a node in your outline, so you can still link case-briefs or other outlines to your notes. You just can’t view them all in one frame. To give you some insight into how I use it, I create my briefs with a template in Word (sigh) and then link them to my class notes outline. So when I need to look at the brief, I double click on the link, and there it is. It’s not as elegant as the multiple panes, but it’s functional.

NoteMap is a vastly superior outliner to the other products, which is why I tend to like it best. It’s flexible enough that I use it for other projects, it’s not just for note taking (I use it in Legal Writing/Legal Methods/Lawyering Skills/Whatever for outlining memos, etc.)
That said, it is a whole lot more money. If I were rating it against the others just as an outliner, I’d give it three stars) but here, it’s just above the other two, mainly because of a personal preference for more outlining freedom.

Rating: Two Gavels.

Clearly, the software geared towards aiding law students needs a lot of work. However, they all beat the hell out of Word, and if you need (or want) something beyond law school, NoteMap makes a good deal of sense.