Most law students struggle with digesting large amounts of information under tight deadlines. Managing time can be difficult when working under pressure and with limited resources. In recent years, technology has played a pivotal role in the lives of law students and legal professionals alike. Technological tools have acted as study aids, stress relief and assisted with work management
I made law students and legal professionals a list of invaluable apps that I think can help. Here are my top 5 tools that I have relied on throughout my studies and career.
1. Dropbox or Google Drive/OneDrive
In my opinion, everyone should use a cloud storage solution. This way, you will be able to save your documents, assignments, and any relevant study materials handy and ready to be accessed anywhere and at anytime. Imagine a scenario where your bag gets stolen or perhaps your laptop crashes a few days before your deadline. It’s not impossible, it may happen to anyone. In fact, it happened to me. But if you have them saved on one of above-mentioned tools, there will be no issues.
A note of caution; remember that Cloud Storage is like an external disk drive on your laptop. It might be that you are using Cloud Storage as a backup for your files, but you can also use it as just another folder. In other words, if you only have a single copy of a file, no matter where it is stored, if it is accidentally deleted, you might lose it. Cloud Storage and back up are not the same thing!
https://www.google.com/drive/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/onedrive/online-cloud-storage https://www.dropbox.com/
2. Microsoft Outlook
This app is especially great for students who have multiple emails to manage. That could be your work email, your university email or your private email. Microsoft outlook keeps all of your emails simultaneously open in one tab, and you could manage them separately as you wish. Having this app handy is a lifesaver.
3. Legal Cheek
Legal Cheek is the most read legal news organisation in the UK. They provide aspiring lawyers and students with a combination of news, analysis, careers advice and insider insight on the leading law firms and chambers operating in the UK. Law students can use Legal Cheek to stay commercially aware, and to get ahead of the curve with invaluable career advice. You can also tune in on the industry gossip!
4. Casedo
Okay, I’ll admit a little bias here, but Casedo is a brilliant tool to help any law student and legal professional manage a paperless workload. As a law student, you can use this as a workspace to bring together all of your documents into one space. You can easily switch between them, highlight the vital information, annotate your documents, make notes and link between files. The software was initially developed for legal professionals; however, due to the high demand, law students can now also use it for their coursework and in their mooting competitions. Casedo is designed as a space to bring together relevant inter-related documents to make sense of them; as such, it is excellent for research and case management.
5. Headspace
It is a fact that law is a very demanding course, and it is almost unlikely that a law student did not struggle with their mental health during busy periods like exam season. Headspace helps and teaches users how to meditate with guided meditation sessions. Meditation improves focus and decreases stress and anxiety. Emotional well-being is essential when attending law school. You’ll be under an immense amount of stress, and learning how to meditate and calm your mind can make it all a little more manageable.
While you’re here, why not read our article on ‘Let’s talk about Mental Health First Aid’? Click HERE for the full text on Legal Futures.
