The heart-thumping pressure of law school starts as soon as you walk into the classroom. Professors will expect you to be thoroughly knowledgeable of assigned case studies and the legal principles behind them. You will study civil procedure, constitutional law, legal writing, and more, with some schools requiring you to participate in moot court and argue hypothetical cases.
However, if you've decided you're willing to do the work to become a legal practitioner, there are things you can leverage to make the process easier. One of them is tech.
Here's how you can use modern technology to survive law school.
Study law online
Law school is expensive. The average tuition for private law school costs a whopping $53,000. If you can't cover this with scholarship funds, you can consider studying law online. Learning platforms offer cheaper and even free courses that encompass different legal fields. There's edX, which provides massive open online courses (MOOCs) where institutions like the University of Pennsylvania hold classes you can audit. Meanwhile, programs like those at the Syracuse University College of Law offer a hybrid setup. Here, you can take self-paced online classes in addition to attending those onsite. While the American Bar Association doesn't yet accredit any fully-online JD program, you can utilize these tools to lighten law school's cost and generally offer yourself more flexibility.
Save on textbook costs
Not only is law school itself expensive-the additional cost of textbooks can pile up to $3,000. To get around this, you have two options. One is to use your very helpful local library. While you won't be able to take textbooks outside of the venue, you can use a mobile scanning tool like CamScanner to make your own copies for free. Another of the best online legal resources at your disposal is the Open Textbook Library, which has textbooks that are free to use and distribute in portable file forms, such as PDF or EPUB.
Take better notes
Your notes will serve as the backbone of your entire law education, so it's important to make sure you take them down effectively. For this, our article on amazing digital note-taking apps lists OneNote among the best ones out there. The free version of the app offers several handy features you may find helpful, including the ability to extract text from images, a web clipper that allows you to save information from webpages and make it accessible on any device, audio and video recording capabilities you can use for lectures, and a generous amount of storage space. If your law school offers free Office 365 plans, you can even use OneNote Premium.
Streamline your review process
When studying law, reviewing for everything from the LSATs and semestral exams to the bar can be challenging, especially given the sheer amount of legal content you have to cover. You can overcome this obstacle and streamline your review sessions by using tried-and-tested study guides instead of compiling what you need to study on your own. You can start by using Studocu, which stands out as one of the best educational apps in this regard. It allows university students worldwide to upload and share quality study guides, practice questions, course summaries, and lecture notes. With more than 10 million documents, it's guaranteed to have some based on every course you're taking in the exact law school you're attending-making it an app that you can and should take advantage of.
Stay updated on the latest legal developments
Law is not static-especially today, where geopolitical tensions, pandemics, and technology change the global milieu and the legal battles being fought within it. Following current affairs even as a student can help you stay updated on new advances in the legal framework, as well as learn how law evolves to adapt to new situations. One helpful strategy for this is using a law firm content aggregator which gives you access to bulletins and articles produced by law firms. You can utilize this to hear the latest issues about arbitration, white-collar crime, and more from legal experts. One good example is Lexology, but there are others out there that provide the same service.
No app in the world is going to make law school easy, but leveraging modern technology can simplify some aspects of it. When you're doing something as arduous as studying law, take every tool you can get to make life a little easier so you can better focus on your most pressing priorities.
For more articles about helpful tech and how to use it, check out our homepage.
