Also, it is worth checking out the book “Effective Knowledge Management for Law Firms” by Matthew Parsons.
A bit outdated, but shows a great entry point on why and how to build a KM.
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Also, archive everything you have made a note about. Save it - without copyright infringement of course - in the same folder under your own naming convention and create a link to the file in the note.
Books, journals, podcasts, juridicial act and contract templates - anything. Try to use the most universal file extension possible.
Heh, is there any available Obsidian showcase of civil law originated ppl?
Would love to see how you guys implement the PKM of laws
I am a member of the legal education commission and the human rights commissions of the OAB sectional of my state, and I use Obsidian to manage a personal knowledge base, for external links, referral of bibliographic references with Zotero, academic writing, forensic writing, popular education, community and humanitarian aid, popular legal advice and for many use cases in which I also integrate a mix of technological tools such as Jusbrasil, AWS and Google Cloud, both for the elaboration of my constitutional, administrative, civil, social security, among other branches of public and private law that I work, of course, together with Microsoft Word and some PDF tool that suits the training required by the various electronic process systems existing in my beloved country.
Obsidian is a great tool, despite being under development and can still provide many improvements, but above all because it allows practically the inclusion of any type of plugin and additional functionalities and for its community focused on personal knowledge management and learning methods through writing. and other productivity management techniques, at least that’s what it seems to me.
Obsidian’s notion and backlinks is powerful, its graphic along with the internal and external links can also provide great functionality for a knowledge worker, such as a teacher or lawyer like me, and when it comes to hypermedia or writing in a environment that closely resembles the World Wide Web and GitHub itself.
With Obsidian I can request my notes and enhance navigation between them, in addition to associating content to obtain new insights. I hope to one day improve my programming skills in html, css and javascript and be able to do fantastic things on Obsidian and on the web in general, incorporating technologies and humanities into the science of law.
Of course, I use other techniques and philosophies in my work, which I would not dare to share with you in a single post, without the need for theoretical deepening and practical guidance, even weekend training, such as how I use my own Zettelkasten along with Get Things Done (GTD), Spaced Repetition, HTML Mind Maps linked to notes, file hosting and cloud computing, life coaching assessments, life hacking, biohacking and why not a sub-theme called management of legal knowledge, procedural practice, research and organization of procedural documents and theses with Obsidian through the use of legal technology to search for jurisprudence, precedents, cases, petitions, contractual clauses among other things that permeate the life of a great jurist , lawyer or legal professional.
Other than that, I hope it provided insights into my legal non-profit and education use case.
Big hugs to the community.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Vinícius Procópio
same problem with legislation here, pls help
Just want to +1 for Obsidian as a tool for lawyers or anyone in the legal field.
I am an attorney who was formerly in private practice and am now in-house. I used Obsidian heavily while at my law firm, and continue to do so in my new role. I use it primarily for matter and task management, communication notes, and (when I was working for the firm) time keeping. Happy to share more details about my workflow if anyone is interested.
I have dabbled in using Obsidian as a PKM system for brief precedents, cases, statutes, etc. as well as my own insights, and found that when I spent the time to set it up, it was a significant value-add. However, I often find that my work is too fast-paced to put in the leg-work throughout my work day for Obsidian to be fully functional for me as a PKM (for the purposes I need, anyway). I also struggle to identify what information is too much to include in my notes, in light of ready access to tools like Lexis/Westlaw. However, I intended to explore this use case for Obsidian more in the future.
I research business laws/cases and tasks have no significance (for me). I use dataview heavily to gather end results and key points contested
Yes I would be interested to hear more about this.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is, in addition to knowledge management, using the daily note as a daily log of my work, calls, meetings, todos, etc. What I’m currently struggling is whether the daily note is the record of all work with links in the project/case note or whether the daily note just has the reference to the discussion, meeting, call, etc (as, say a back link) . And the details are refactored into the project/case note or some other location.
It’s fascinating to see how lawyers are adopting knowledge management tools like Obsidian for their work. While I don’t have specific insights, it’s clear that these tools can be valuable for legal practitioners.
I use it primarily for maintaining a chron file of case notes. I do have Hookmark links to my Dropbox folders in Obsidian, primarily for easy reference while I’m making a case note. But as someone else noted, most legal files are pdf and Microsoft office docs, which I’ve not really found a way to efficiently manage in Obsidian. I annotate pdf’s in Acrobat, hookmark a URL link to insert into a note in Obsidian, and use it that way.
I miss Casemap still, but not enough to go back to using Windows. I’ve tried DEVONthink but they lost me when they failed to get their database structure modified in time for a major OS X change 2 or 3 years ago, and my database links all broke. I’ll never use any product that uses a proprietary database system again. I am using Obsidian because I know I can always access my files no matter what happens.