Thank you to GoodNotes for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. I’ve been using this app for many years, and it is one of my all-time favorite apps for the iPad, an app that I use almost every day in my law practice. I especially love using GoodNotes on the large screen of my 12.9″ iPad Pro, but any size iPad paired with an Apple Pencil can be a fantastic substitute for a legal pad. And “substitute” is probably not the right word because it doesn’t capture what a dramatic improvement it is over pen and paper.
The GoodNotes app allows you to create notebooks and organize those notebooks into folders. I have a folder for firm-related notebooks, a folder for one client for which I have a high-volume of cases, and a folder for all of my other clients. I have a folder of older notebooks that I probably won’t need again, but you never know when it is useful to dig up something from the past. (The oldest notebook that is still on my iPad hasn’t been modified since January 13, 2014, but I have older ones on my computer that I exported many years ago.) I also have a folder for notebooks related to my family, a CLE folder for any notes that I take during a CLE, and a Miscellaneous folder that has various different notebooks including one dedicated to puzzles. (I take a screenshot of a crossword on my iPad, paste that onto a page of my puzzle notebook, and then I use GoodNotes to try to solve a crossword — which I prefer doing with a stylus rather than typing letters on an on-screen keyboard.) That Miscellaneous folder also contains a scratch paper notebook that I use for various things. A few nights ago, I used that one when I was helping my sixth grade daughter study for a math test; I would write a problem and then she would solve it.
For my litigation practice, I typically have a single notebook for each case. That makes it easy to search all of the notes related to a case when I’m trying to find something that I wrote months or years earlier. Sometimes I will use a dedicated notebook for a project. For example, when I prepare for and attend an appellate oral argument, a mediation, or a trial, I sometimes create a special notebook for that project.
I take virtually all of my notes using a legal pad template. There is one built-in to GoodNotes, but I prefer to use one that I created myself because I like having the dotted red lines on the left and right side. If you want to download my legal paper template and use it yourself with your own notebooks in GoodNotes, click here to download my legal paper template file. You can import any PDF file into GoodNotes and save it as a template to use with one or more notebooks.
Now that GoodNotes supports using two windows at once, I’m surprised how often I find it useful to have a page of reference notes on the left while I take new notes on the right.
Sometimes I use this to open two instances of the same notebook so that I can see different pages at the same time. For example, I often attend a meeting where there is an agenda sent around by email before the meeting. I insert that PDF File into my notes (if the agenda is in Word format, I use the Word for iPad app to convert it to PDF). Sometimes I take handwritten notes right on the agenda. Other times I use my legal pad template, and it is nice to look at the agenda on the left at the same time that I am writing on subsequent pages on the right. The ability to open up two instances of the same notebook is very useful, so much so that it was recently honored by the MacStories website, which gave that feature the runner-up award for best new app feature of 2019. (The top award went to the new feature in the Overcast app that lets you share a clip from a podcast, which I agree is a neat feature, but it is far less useful in a law practice.)
I usually just keep my notes in the GoodNotes app, but sometimes I will export a notebook as a PDF file, which I then save using my firm’s document management system. Because GoodNotes automatically performs an OCR of your notes, the PDF file is searchable.
Using GoodNotes to take digital notes is great for so many reasons. All of my notes for all of my cases are with me at al times, even notes that I took years ago. I like being able to use different pen colors in my notes to make them easier to read and organize, and it is nice that you can insert a picture into a document and then annotate that image. You can even use your iPhone or iPad to take a picture of something like a PowerPoint slide and then immediately insert that into your notes, ready for you to annotate. And it is easy to move around your notes between pages to make room for something else that you want to insert.
If you own an iPad and a stylus and you are not yet taking digital notes on your iPad, I strongly encourage you to try doing so with the GoodNotes app. This is a fantastic app, and it is a key part of my paperless law practice. Thanks again to GoodNotes for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month.
Click here to get GoodNotes 5 ($7.99): 