If you’ve followed Mac Law Students for any length of time, you know that I’ve struggled to figure out what to do with the site since I graduated from law school waaay back in 2008. I’m happy to report that after a mere two years of screwing around, I’ve finally come up with a way to keep the site going and infuse it with a new sense of purpose.
The fact that I decided not to take the bar exam after obtaining my J.D. should be evidence enough that anyone who is serious about becoming a lawyer should not be spending their few spare hours each week managing an online resource for Mac-using law students. But I also feel strongly that the person who runs the site should be someone involved in the law school experience, someone who is close to the subject matter.
Enter Dennis Bishop. From the early days of MLS, Dennis has been an excellent source of information, and a leader in getting the word out about the benefits of Macs in law school. Even better, Dennis has a day job that keeps him in touch with law school technology; he’s the the Director of Information & Technology at the University of Oregon School of Law.
After several discussions, Dennis and I agreed that he would be the right person to take over MLS. This is a personal project for him, and Mac Law Students still remains unaffiliated with any law school or other entity, legal, illegal, past, present, or future. Dennis will be running MLS for fun. He even refused to take the six-figure salary I offered him.
I will continue to own the domain and pay for the hosting of MLS, and Dennis will run the rest of the show. I’m excited to see what he does with the site, and I hope you will give him your support as he takes the ball and runs with it.
If you’re like most 1Ls, you probably had visions of beaches, mojitos and relaxing following your final spring exam. But somewhere along the way, you started to hear rumblings of a casenote competition. Fast-forward now 10 days after my last final, and I’m still in the library, still reading cases, and still not drinking mojitos. Welcome to Law School (again).
While I don’t have any tips on how to write a good casenote (I’m trying to figure that one out myself) I did run across something that might get you an extra point or two (or at least prevent you from losing points). The whole thing about a casenote competition is that it’s supposed to be anonymous. That way editors of law reviews can read all 200+ submissions and curve them on the dreaded 1L curve without anyone accusing them of playing favorites. To keep things anonymous, you’ll be told to double check to make sure you haven’t typed your name anywhere in the document. So you’ve checked and double checked. Done, right? Nope! You still have to strip out metadata.
Metadata is that weird behind the scenes info that each document keeps automatically. It includes things like your name, date, what word processor you used, and so on.
The last thing you want is to lose a point or two because an editor glances at the metadata and sees your name glaring at them. How do you erase this info? I did a little bit of searching and found this gem from Boston University: It’s an easy to follow three step process to erase the basic metadata from a PDF.
When you’re done, it should look like this!
Enjoy!
Note: Because the method uses Automator, it requires you be running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later.
Yes, it’s that time of year again. If you have info about your state’s policy regarding Macs and the bar exam, please let me know.
The MLS Bar Exam Software page has info on the following states:
- Alabama
- Alaska
- Arizona
- California
- Colorado
- Georgia
- Kentucky
- Illinois
- Iowa
- Maryland
- Minnesota
- Nebraska
- New York
- Oregon
- Texas
- Utah
- Virginia
Most of the info for those states is at least a year old, so if you have more current info, please pass it my way so I can update the page. As always, thanks for your support.
Undergrad John Rust provides some revealing insights about how he uses his iPad on a daily basis. Note his yearning for an iPad version of OmniOutliner.
As classes finish up and another academic year comes to an end, I wanted to share a resource I have been using throughout this semester: A Casebrief Search Engine.
Whether you like to book brief, paper brief or not brief, sometimes it’s nice to be able to reference casebriefs online. I started out using Google and entering case names. The challenge: too many irrelevant results. So I decided to use Google custom search to create a search site that would only index sites that provide casebriefs. While you won’t find every brief, hopefully you’ll find most!
Enjoy, and good luck on finals!
If you know of other sites that should be added, leave them in the comments and we’ll add them ASAP.
