At the (new) legal writer, Raymond Ward has a useful post called "Owning your downloaded legal authorities," in which he describes his own personal system for reading and annotating case law after downloading it into a word processing program.
A few of Ward's tips:
- "Use Word or WordPerfect to highlight the parts that are most important."
- "Instead of writing in the margins of a hard copy, use Word or WordPerfect to insert comments. That way, your comments will be saved on your electronic copy."
- "Edit the document header to add all information needed to cite the case. This will later save you the trouble of printing an entire 24-page case when you only need one page with one juicy quotation."
As an old-fashioned lawyer who prints off cases and writes on them with a pen -- and then promptly loses the cases, the notes, and the pen -- I am going to switch to Ward's method. But you've got to read Ward's entire post for all his tips, so be sure to follow my link.
You might be interested in trying an online service we've developed at A.nnotate.com - it lets you add notes to highlighted text of uploaded word / pdf documents just using a web browser, and everything (highlighted phrases, notes etc) gets added to your private notes index so you can find it later.
Posted by: Fred | February 27, 2009 at 11:51 AM