Jury Notes

PowerNotes - new product at UNH FP Law to track your research to make writing easier

powernotes: A new tool to help you organize your research and writing

Academic Success, Legal Writing, and the Law Library are pleased to announce that UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law has partnered with PowerNotes to bring you premium access to a new tool that will help you save time while writing better briefs, memos, and seminar papers.  

PowerNotes makes legal research more efficient by letting you:

• Quickly save information from any online source (across platforms): Highlight, annotate, and save all your content from any website, including WestLaw and Lexis, into custom categories with a single click.
• Organize on-the-fly: Use PowerNotes to gather your sources while the system automatically builds an outline as you research. Then easily restructure your research to support specific sections of your paper.
• Never lose track of your sources: PowerNotes saves URLs, Westlaw, and Lexis materials automatically, so you’ll never forget where you found something.  
• Are the citations formatted for ALWD/Bluebook? No. While PowerNotes takes citations from Westlaw, Lexis, HeinOnline, and Bloomberg and copies them into your PowerNotes interface it is not 100% accurate. The citations provide the basic info, but you are the expert.  You can edit each citation to fix it up and make sure it is in line with the ALWD/Bluebook rules. 

Install the PowerNotes Chrome extension and use your law school email to create a free premium account at powernotes.com. To learn more about how to use PowerNotes click here.

Take a look at this short video (below) to get a feel for PowerNotes for Law School and Legal Research – remember, an automated citation tool (Lexis/Westlaw copy with citation or PowerNotes citation service) is never 100% accurate.  You’ll always need to revise the citation to make it ALWD/Bluebook compatible.

Step by Step Instructions - 

How to use this Chrome and Firefox browser extension (Safari is coming but not here yet) with links to more explanation:

STEP 1: INSTALL POWERNOTES AND CREATE YOUR ACCOUNT

Using either a Mac or PC, install the PowerNotes Chrome extension (you can also install the Chrome extension on the Microsoft Edge browser) or Firefox extension, then follow the prompts from the extension to create your account. Sign up with your UNH FP Law school email address for premium access.

When you create an account, you’ll get a verification email to your UNH Law email address - check your spam folder. Just click on the verification link in that email and you will be all set. 

 STEP 2: GATHERING AND SAVING PASSAGES

Navigate to a relevant website or pdf, then:

• Use your cursor to highlight text in the article. Once you highlight text, a menu will pop up with generic topic names (Topic 1 and Topic 2).
• Select a topic to categorize your highlight.
• After you have selected a topic, you’ll see the notes box appear. Type any notes related to the passage you’ve highlighted then hit the enter key or click the checkmark icon in the notes box to save the passage. There is no limit to the notes you can take. Just use ctrl, alt, shift, or command + Enter to add line breaks.
• Your highlight and notes as well as a source link will appear in the sidebar.

Click here for tips on how to highlight faster in PowerNotes.

Read more on adding topics, changing topic names, and reordering topics.

 STEP 3: THE SIDEBAR AND YOUR FIRST PROJECT

First, take a look at the PowerNotes sidebar:

• At the top is your project name. Initially your project will be labeled “New Project,” which you can change later.
• Below that, you’ll see a filter and a link to your project outline.
• The rest of the sidebar is where your highlights, notes, and source links will populate when you start researching.

Learn how to get the sidebar out of your way.

 STEP 4: YOUR PROJECT OUTLINE

You can access your project outline by clicking on the “Project Outline” link in the upper right of the sidebar. In your project outline you can reorganize your work, change the title and description of your project, and download your work to Word or a .RIS file.

See how to use the project outline to get a better start on your first draft.

 STEP 5: ENABLING AND DISABLING THE EXTENSION

To enable (or disable) the extension, click on the “P” icon in the extension tray in the upper right navigation section of your browser window and change the switch to ”Yes” (or “No”). This is how you turn PowerNotes on when you are researching and off when you’re browsing or doing other activities.

If you run into trouble using PowerNotes, contact PowerNotes Tech Support to Get help.  

If you have questions about using PowerNotes, please email Sue Zago at sue.zago@law.unh.edu