The Best Study Apps for Law Students
You’ve made it to law school so there is no question about whether you can muster the determination to study hard. But do you know what tools are out there to help you study smart? Your smartphone can be a major source of distraction but it can also be an incredibly useful tool to manage your assignments, tests and exams and maximize your learning effectiveness.
In this article, we look at some of the best smartphone apps that could help you study better, manage your time effectively and achieve your best grades in law school. Yes, we wrote this article, but hear us out — in this article we are looking at the apps that we wish we had as law students (and that certainly includes the Ginger Snail App), before we trailed off into the Magic Circle and Big Law firms. We're sure you'll find an app on this list that will bring your law school studies to the next level!
Best Apps for Law Revision
1. Ginger Snail
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Cost: £49.99 /year (per module) or £7.99/month (per module)
Platforms: Android, iOS (iPhone, iPad), Web browsers
Ginger Snail is a dedicated law student revision app that is both a quick revision tool as well as a smooth content-navigation solution. You must have heard the phrase, “don’t just study hard, study smart!” The Ginger Snail team, composed of lawyers from Magic Circle and Big Law firm, designed an app that would help students do just that.
The Ginger Snail app is not just about bringing content together - there are many law notes shops that do just that - the team's mission is to offer a seamlessly navigable platform so that students can ace their exams efficiently, and enjoy law school. Sometimes students are keen to get to the "key points" and, at other times, the "exact words" of judgments. What if there was an app which enabled you to navigate from "key point", to quote, to a collection of relevant extracts from a judgment, simply with a couple of swipes? That's just one of the awesome features of the Ginger Snail app.
Other features offered by the Ginger Snail app include:
- 🔭 Telescopic case navigation ⮕ a wider and more contextual view of case law with each swipe.
- 🔮 Three modes of viewing content ⮕ Law, Cases, Law & Cases.
- 🧪 Quiz library ⮕ Multiple choice format for quick-fire revision.
2. Save All
Cost: Free
Platforms: Android, iOS (iPhone, iPad), Web browsers
Save All is an app that provides students with a simple and intuitive way to revise the material they have studied. Law students can input the key legal points they have studied and the Save All app would automatically create fill-in-the-blank question cards based on that input. Once created, additional questions can be added to a question card. Students can create decks and sub-decks to organise their study cards, which is helpful for particularly complex legal topics.
Save All is a pretty neat way for students to create customised revision tests to really drill down on key legal concepts. If a student is unable to answer a question, Save All will generate hints on demand to help the student get to the correct answer.
3. Quizlet
Cost: Free limited version and full-access paid options
Platforms: Android, iOS (iPhone, iPad), Web browsers
We’ve said it before (and you know) that there is a lot of content to learn In law school. Like Save All, Quizlet allows you to create your own customised study materials. In addition to fill-in-the-blank questions, you can create matching games and flashcard decks. You can even share your flashcards with other students which is a great way to tackle complex legal topics collaboratively. Quizlet also allows you to build a “study set”, which is a personalized a personalized study schedule.
4. Anki
Cost: Free
Platforms: Android, iOS (iPhone, iPad), Web browsers
Similar to Quizlet, Anki is essentially a flashcard creation app. What makes Anki so special is its functionality. While Anki has fewer study mode options than Quizlet, Anki implements a spaced repetition system, which presents flashcards containing information that the student struggles with more often than those in which the student is more confident. This really helps students target the more difficult topics, making their law revision that much more efficient.
https://apps.ankiweb.net/
Best Apps for Notetaking
5. Notion
Cost: Free limited version and full-access paid options
Platforms: Android, iOS
Notion is a versatile cloud-based platform for creating and managing content. Notion is actually hard to describe or define due to the massive scope of things one can do with it. For law students, Notion is a great platform for creating and managing your study materials. With Notion, law students can create checklists of materials they have to study, create notes within notes (pages with links to other pages) and easily embed or link images, documents and other media into their notes. The ability to create pages within pages is great because it allows you to create a hierarchy of detail when organising your notes.
Notion is also great for managing projects, be they social gatherings or year-end dissertations. For instance, when preparing for your dissertation, it might be helpful to create a table of all the research materials you have to read through, with columns for comments and ideas. Then, pace yourself by planning your writing and research sessions with a calendar timeline. Remember, with all the materials you learn in law school, you don’t want to burn out — it is a marathon, not a sprint!
Notion syncs across platforms and gives you access to your content across all devices.
6. Soundnote
Cost: £4.49
Platforms: iOS (iPad only)
Students have no control over the pace of lectures, particularly where lectures are delivered through live sessions. Few people are able to write as fast as lecturers speak, and even fast typists may miss points due to typos during live lectures. Lecture slides or notes mainly serve to facilitate the structure of a lecture and often do not always contain everything a lecturer ends up saying, such as useful anecdotes to help illustrate complex legal concepts. Soundnote aims to help students capture everything by recording the audio of your surroundings (i.e. a lecture or tutorial) while you are taking notes. Soundnote then pairs the audio to your notes and allows you to playback the audio recording at the time you were making a particular note – simply tap on a word from your notes and the playback will begin from the point in time you wrote it. With Soundnote, you improve your chances of capturing entire lectures, leaving nothing to chance.
7. EverNote
Cost: Free limited version and full-access paid options
Platforms: Android, iOS (iPhone, iPad), Web browsers
Evernote is an excellent app for creating, compiling and organising your law study notes. Students using Evernote can incorporate text, drawings, photographs, online web content, videos and audio recordings into their notes. All your content can be further annotated, tagged with labels, edited and searched. Users of Evernote will then be able to export content for viewing on other devices.
Evernote also has a easy-to-use system for managing tasks. Tasks can be given due dates, flags and reminders. For users of GoogleCalendar, you can even synch Evernote tasks so that your key events, appointments and tasks are in one place.
For students who study better in groups, Evernote allows you to share your notes to collaborate with others.
8. Todoist
Cost: Free limited version and full-access paid options
Platforms: Android, iOS (iPhone, iPad)
Todoist is a brilliant tool for task management which combines, among other things, user-created tasks, comments, attachments and more. Law students can use the Todoist app to keep track of your assignments, study sessions and law firm events, so you can plan your busy law school life and have ample time to socialize. Students can organize their tasks by customised categories or priority, and when your to-do list gets really busy, customisable filters help you sort your tasks in a way that is optimal for you.
The Todoist interface is clean and intuitive, and makes the chore of planning your student life a simple pleasure. If your to-do list involves tasks that require collaboration with other people(e.g., viewing a new flat you are going to rent with your friends or splitting tasks for a group project, Todoist caters for it by allowing you to share your task lists.
Todoist is a cloud-based app, where all your tasks and notes are automatically synched to your other devices.
9. SimpleMind
Cost: Free limited version and full-access paid options
Platforms: Android, iOS
As a law student, you will notice that very often, legal concepts overlap. Further, it is not always clear what the boundaries of these overlaps are. For instance, the concept of "misrepresentation" in contract law, may appear to have some overlap with the concept of "negligence" in tort law. You will also notice that the courts tend to take an overall view of the context of the matters being analysed, and so no single factor is often determinative of the outcome of a case. What might help construct your mental model of how the multifarious facets of the law interact with each other is a mind map.
SimpleMind, as its name suggests is a simple mind mapping tool for you to easily input legal concepts and key notes to create mind maps. The law is a nuanced and precise endeavour, but having a good idea of the overall picture is also absolutely crucial.
... and one more app
10. LinkedIn
Cost: Free limited version and full-access paid options
Platforms: Android, iOS (iPhone, iPad), Web browsers
One big thing aspiring lawyers will have to grapple with is “commercialawareness”. Commercial awareness is basically keeping up to date on what isgoing on in the business world and, for law students in particular, the legalindustry. LinkedIn is a great resource for this because developments, businessideas and legal updates are constantly published on LinkedIn. Many law firmsuse LinkedIn to market themselves in their various areas of expertise. Lawstudents can tap on this information to prepare for their vacation scheme andtraining contract interviews.
