How To Manage Documents In Law School
5 min read ★
As you will have noticed from our strong focus on planning in past articles, we believe that organisation is vital to success at law school with the minimal expenditure of time and effort.
When you are doing multiple courses at university, the volume of documents you create and use can be overwhelming.
It is imperative that you go into each semester in law school with a document management system that is accessible, organised and structured.
If you can spend time to set up near-automatic systems at the start of each semester and week, you will cut down the number of decisions to be made each day and save yourself immeasurable time and effort.
Below are the four Simple steps to managing your documents effectively.
1. Use a cloud-based storage system
2. Keep a master “Uni” folder, and add sub-folders for each semester you complete
3. Create a folder for each course/subject for the ongoing semester
4. Within each course folder, create sub-folders appropriate to the structure of that course
1. Use a cloud-based storage system
As things stand, cloud-based storage is the single most effective method of storing your documents. Don’t even think about bringing out that old USB stick from high school.
It does not matter which cloud provider you use – iCloud, Google Drive and OneDrive are all viable alternatives – you just need to find the storage plan that fits your needs.
There is no risk of losing your cloud drive, and you will be able to access and sync the drive from any device, as long as you have internet connection. Even if you don’t, the files will save on your hard drive and sync as soon as you are connected.
2. Keep a master “Uni” folder, and add sub-folders for each semester you complete
This folder will become the master source for all of your past uni work. Keeping it all in one place is a good idea because you will definitely find yourself coming back to past assignments and summaries when studying subsequent courses.
Below is an example showing what my “Uni” folder looked like at end of my degree (“SPs” being Study Periods, or semesters):
3. Create a folder for each course/subject for the ongoing semester
Each of these folders will be the main place where you save all documents relevant to the course.
Within this folder you could also save documents you will use throughout the semester, like the academic calendar, or a soft copy of the AGLC.
For example, below is an image of my 2016 “SP4” folder:
4. Within each course folder, create sub-folders appropriate to the structure of that course
The structure of your folders will depend on what type of assessments the course has, whether there is an exam, and to what extent the exam covers all of the course material.
Here is an example of the structure of my Constitutional Law course, with further explanation below:
As you can see, I recommend sorting the sub-folders by grouping files relevant to each topic, not by grouping files relevant to “lectures” and “tutorials”. This is because sorting by topic makes it much easier to access all of the relevant materials when you need to go back to it at exam time.
Generally, the folders common to each will be:
1. Each topic and corresponding week number(s).
Within this folder, you save:
- your “Lecture” notes file;
- your “Tutorial” or “Seminar” notes file;
- the lecture slides (if available); and
- any other relevant materials you gathered in that week, including any special readings provided by your lecturer that week.
If you only have hard copies of some materials, make an effort to scan them into pdf versions.
If the same topic goes over multiple weeks, you should include each into one topic folder. Also, compile all of the weeks’ lecture and tutorial notes into one file. This simplifies your document management and gives you a complete picture of the topic when it comes time to revisit the topics at exam time.
2. “Assessments” folder
Within this folder, you may need to create sub-folders for each assessable task.
Here, you should be saving:
- your planning documents,
- the assignment document itself;
- separate folders for any research or materials you will be using to complete the assessment.
I would always save pdf versions of journal articles or books you are using – there is nothing worse than losing a source and not being able to reference it later on.
Example:
3. “Summaries” folder (for courses with exams)
As the name suggests, this is where you save the summaries you create.
When preparing the summaries, we recommend referring to our 3 Steps to Creating the Perfect Law Exam Summary for the Simple method to preparing for exams by creating summaries.
You may need to also sort your summaries into sub-folders, depending on the structure of the course.
Example:
Let us know if you have any other tips for organising documents in the comments.
