Law school note taking fails in one dominant way: transcription. The student types everything the professor says, produces twenty pages a week per course, and has captured a podcast in text form, unprocessed, unprioritized, and destined never to be reread. The fix is a job description.

Class notes have exactly one job: capture what is not already in your brief, which means the professor's layer, their framing of the doctrine, their hypos, their distinctions, their tells about the exam. Everything else in the room, the facts of the case, the holding, the rule as written, you already own from last night's reading.

The two column method

Split the page, physically or with a template. Left column: the doctrine as the professor builds it, rules in their phrasing, the structure they impose on the unit, corrections to your reading.

Right column: the live material, every hypo with its answer, every this case is really about, every distinction between neighboring doctrines, and anything within a sentence of the words on the exam, which is the highest grade ore a semester produces. A cleaner variant for laptop briefers: keep the brief on screen and annotate it directly during class, filling the class hook field from the brief template in real time, so the reading document and the class document are the same document by the end of the hour.

What to capture verbatim, and what to drop

Verbatim, four things. The professor's preferred rule formulation, especially when it differs from the casebook's, because on their exam their phrasing is the right one. Hypo facts and the professor's resolution, since class hypos are exam questions in rehearsal.

Anything written on the board, which is the professor telling you what deserves ink. And exam signals in any form: this confuses people every year, you will see this again, I always ask about. Dropped, three things.

Case recaps you briefed last night. Most student comments, capture the rare one the professor adopts, skip the rest. And the tangents, however entertaining, unless they end in a rule or a position, in which case the position is a note, professor thinks felony murder indefensible, useful for the policy question.

Laptop or hand, and the honest answer

The research fight over typed versus handwritten notes mostly measures the transcription trap: typing is fast enough to transcribe, so typists transcribe, and handwriting forces selection by being slow. But the method above imposes selection on either medium, which makes the choice practical rather than moral. Type if your exams are typed and speed serves you, with notifications off and nothing else on screen, because divided attention converts class into expensive background noise.

Write by hand if the keyboard tempts you into stenography or the internet. Either way, the medium is downstream of the job description.

The processing steps that make notes worth taking

Two habits close the loop. The five minute pass, immediately after class or at the next break: fill the gaps while the hour is fresh, star every confusion, the starred list is your office hours agenda, and flag anything that belongs in the outline.

And the weekly synthesis, the Friday block from the study loop, where the week's right column gets mined into the outline: hypos become application notes, professor phrasings replace casebook phrasings, exam signals become flags on the relevant doctrine. Notes are raw material with a shelf life; notes never processed within a week are the system failing quietly, and rereading them cold in November is the expensive version of processing them warm in September.

FAQ

Should I record lectures instead?

Most schools and professors prohibit recording without permission, and even where allowed it doubles your time cost: the hour happens twice and the selection work still waits at the end. Better notes in the room beat perfect audio after it.

Is it okay to share notes with classmates?

Sharing is fine and common, covering an absence, comparing hypo answers. Just know that the value of notes is mostly manufactured in the taking and the processing, so borrowed notes patch a gap without transferring the asset.

What if the professor talks too fast to keep up?

Let the narrative go and guard the right column: hypos, rule phrasings, exam signals. A gap in the story fills in five minutes with a classmate; a missed hypo is the only genuinely scarce material in the room.

Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.

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