Use digital pens, keyboarding, or audio recording for greater efficiency.
When you talk on the phone or attend a meeting, you must have a digital note-taking process in place. Otherwise you’ll quickly default to ink pen and paper.
Traditionally, lawyers take notes with pen and paper. This is still an option in an electronic office, but it’s not optimal. If you make handwritten notes, then you need to scan them into your system Scanning is inefficient and avoided when possible.
Best pens for handwriting and scanning
If you hand-write your notes, use solid-marking pens such as a gel pen or very good ball-point pens ensuring your writing darker and clear in the scanned document. I find that cheaper ball-point pens’ marking isn’t very dark which results in poorer scanning.
I’m a huge fan of gel pens because they scan very well and write very well. This means then to stock your boardroom with pens that scan well.
Instead of hand-writing, you can type your notes, use a tablet, a tablet pc, digital pen and paper, or record your discussions with a digital recorder.
Typing on a computer for note-taking is great while you’re on the phone as long as (1) you have headset (a must have for everyone in the office, wireless preferably), and (2) you know how to type.
If you can’t type, then get a tablet PC. A tablet PC uses a stylus (metal pen) to write onto a touch-style screen. You can save your hand-written notes into the computer and/or use the handwriting-recognition to create typed text.
A final consideration is recording your telephone conversations and interviews and then pay for transcription services. These days VoIP makes it easy to digitally record telephone conversations. There are many digital recorders to record interviews that create MP3 files for easy transfer to whoever does transcription.
Be advised that your jurisdiction may have rules about disclosing when you’re recording conversations.
No matter how you take notes on the phone, get a headset. In fact, I highly recommend getting wireless headsets for everyone in your office.
One other option, of course, is having an assistant or junior lawyer take notes (typed, handwritten or on a tablet PC) – whether it be a speaker phone conversation or in-person meeting. This is a great option, but expensive.
Right now when I’m on the phone, I type notes into my case management software phone records form. For in-person meetings, I make handwritten notes. The reason I take handwritten notes in-person is for me, typing behind a computer is impersonal. Also, word-processing doesn’t allow for diagrams and quick illustrations etc.
My optimal solution is getting a tablet PC which I hope to get in the near future. This way I eliminate scanning, a goal we must always have in mind.
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