Notion shines as a note-taking app for two primary reasons:
- It’s customizable.
- It’s collaborative.
While there are many other advantages to Notion, customizability and collaboration rise to the top for lawyers because the tool allows you to take your notes from something of a brain dump and turn them into an organized notebook of useful information that can be shared, edited, commented upon, and (perhaps, most importantly!) quickly and easily found again.
Here are some other things you need to know about how Notion works in order to get the most out of the note-taking tool.
Notion is a block-based tool that allows you to build whatever you want.
The note-taking blocks in Notion come in numerous forms – text, images, checklist, bullet points, HTML code and more. The blocks allow you to create notes within notes, restructure them, duplicate components and share your notes with others.
The tool is highly versatile and allows lawyers the freedom and flexibility for complete customization. For those who prefer a bit more structure, there is an ever-increasing library of note templates upon which you can expand or modify based on what works for you.
Notion’s simple interface makes note-taking organization easy and efficient.
A big part of note-taking is making those notes accessible and meaningful down the road when you need them. A note can quickly lose context if it’s not organized in a useful way. Notion’s platform consists of Notebooks, an Inbox and a Status Dashboard to keep your notes organized.
Here’s a little more about each of these three areas:
- Notebooks are like repositories for your thoughts, and each notebook might contain numerous different notes related a topic. Within each note, you can select a status (open, urgent or archived) as well as a category of your choosing. This enables you to achieve two levels of hierarchy for your organization system.
- The Inbox is where you can quickly capture notes. Later you can come back to these notes in your inbox and categorize them in their corresponding Notebooks.
- The Status Dashboard allows you to view the status of your notes and sort them based on whether they are open or need urgent attention. All notebooks are linked, so any edits to the status within the Status Dashboard will also be reflected in the Notebook itself.
Notion is equipped with nested toggle lists.
Prepping a case requires extensive research, and it’s important to have a way to organize that legal research into a cohesive argument. Nested toggle lists can be a highly useful way to do this, as they enable you to create an outline of ideas and then toggle down for instant access to more detail.
In addition to its note-taking capabilities, Notion offers many other benefits to lawyers, which are worth exploring as well.
