One of the promises of smart phones and tablets was to always have something handy to take notes that you couldn’t lose. Early personal digital assistants included a stylus for notetaking, which was easy to lose. The Notes app installed on iOS devices by default is painfully basic.

Brett Burney had Jeff Richardson as a recent guest on his Apps in Law podcast discussing The Future of Digital Note-Taking with Jeff Richardson and GoodNotes.

Many lawyers have little idea of the many note-taking features now available. Jeff covers his favorite tool, GoodNotes. It is very valuable to hear how he, a practicing litigator, uses this tool representing his clients. It was also interesting to learn why he doesn’t use Notability, another popular note-taking tool, valued by many for its ability to record the lecture or conversation while taking notes.

If you have an iPad but do not get as much business use out of it as you anticipated, it is probably because you do not have a powerful note-taking app and because you do not know about Jeff’s iPhone JD.

If you are a lawyer who uses an iPhone or iPad (about 80% of lawyers), you should already be familiar with his legendary blog, iPhone JD. There is no better source of information for lawyers about apps, iPhones and iPads. A major feature there is his index of prior posts. If you are thinking about purchasing or using an app or looking for gadgets to use with your device, check the index because Jeff has probably already reviewed it or a prior version.