Matt Homann, of the [non]billable hour is guest blogging at Notes from the (Legal) Underground and offers us Five Indispensable Tips for Law Students and New Lawyers.
It’s chock full of great technology advice and I agree with much of what he says. Personally, I would also add:
1. Try a Tablet PC before you buy one. Although Matt is up on them, I had the opportunity to try one out, and I just didn’t think it was all that spectacular. You pay a premium for the technology, and personally, I would wait until it gets better.
2. Outliners are your friend. Even if you don’t use CaseMap/NoteMap, do find yourself an outliner that you like and are comfortable with. I see many of my classmates taking notes in Word, and I wonder how they can keep their notes organized in a way that is intuitive without slitting their wrists in the process.
I’ve actually been using a really awesome little tool called WikiPad for my note taking and briefing. It lets me organize my class notes, case briefs and outlining all in one place, and in a way that makes sense to me, and that’s the most important thing: organization tools don’t do any good if you don’t like them and use them.
3. Learn the power of the PDF. Ernie the Attorney has another blog, called PDF for Lawyers, which unfortunately, doesn’t get updated nearly often enough. Acrobat is an amazing tool for electronic document management (my wife, a practicing attorney, is a PDF whiz who uses them for all kinds of filings, forms, etc.). Use it!

Today I started orientation, so I guess I am officially a “One L”. Since I work in an academic environment, I understand a little bit about the hurdles that have to be overcome in order to roll technology out in a campus environment.

However, is there really an excuse to be paying tens upon tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and “technology fees” and not have wireless access.

Actually, there is wireless access, I’m picking up a number of networks in the area, but of course, they all require keys, keys that I don’t have. Grrr.

Honestly, there isn’t much of an excuse for not having wireless in the classroom at a major law school these days.

Update: I just flagged down one of our “trainers” and he informed me that the infrastructure is in place, it just hasn’t been “rolled out” yet. I suppose that makes me feel a little better. Well, not really, but maybe a touch.

Update: I wonder how many copies of Windows XP Professional the bookstore sold today. There were a number of people who had XP Home, or Windows 2000, and they were sent down to the bookstore to purchase XP Pro.

Thankfully, I not only had it, but I’m already running Service Pack 2. Of course, that means that for basically the first hour, I’m sitting here blogging, while they are walking everyone else through the SP2 installation. On an interesting hardware note, I see exactly 2 Compaq notebooks, 1 IBM, and the rest are entirely Dell.

Final Analysis: That was a complete waste of my time. I do completely understand the need for making sure everyone is on the same page and has the correct technology, but they should have allowed people to “test out” or something. Or they could have said “You need to come with Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 2 and Office 2003 installed, if you need assistance installing these, make an appointment beforehand” It would have shaved 2-3 hours off the orientation, easily.