Your Digital Library Tip #1: Setting Up the Digital File

I suppose the goal of every practitioner today is to build a digital library of legal resources that you can actually find--sort of like a real library with clearly labeled shelves.

Step one is to take what you have and organize your legal resource documents by subject matter.  My best research finds in college were always the books sitting next to the ones I looked up on the library index.  This "proximity principle" works just as well with legal research.  

Organizing your digital documents can be done the hard way:  creating multiple folders and subfolders and saving your digital documents with useful names like "Article-Medical Monitoring Damages."  It can also be done the less hard way:  

1.  Create one (yes only one) folder on your computer and label it something like "Law Library" or "Legal Resources" or something funky like, "Ultimate Dork Hub."  

2.  Find whatever digital legal resources you have on your computer and copy all of them into that one (and only one) folder.  

3.  Create a list of timeless subject headings.  You can copy the subject index from Dorsaneo's Texas Litigation Guide or the subject index in your preferred state or federal treatise.  The key is keep the subject heading's broad and don't deviate from this subject list.  Click here to review the one I use.

4.  Start renaming all those documents in that folder as follows:  [SUBJECT]-[year of publication]-[Type of Resource]-[Brief Description of Resource].  

For example, "DAMAGES-2009-Article-Medical Monitoring Damages in Texas."  There's no sense putting in the Author's Name or the exact title.  That just ends up taking up space on your screen.  

5.   Here's the kicker--TAG each document with the particular traits of the document.  For example, you may want to insert the following tags in the medical monitoring article above:  state_texas, article, damages, medical_monitoring, personal_injury.  This is a great way to distinguish between articles dealing with state and federal law.

If tagging sound a bit foreign, click here for how-to for Windows XP.  It's supposedly easier on Vista.   There are also some commercial programs out there for accomplishing this task, but the buzz on the net is the basic XP / Vista option will get the job done.  

In the end, you'll end up with one screen full of 100s of documents that will immediately allow you to find the relevant subject matter, know how old the resource is, and know whether it's worth even looking at.  With the tag function, you can limit what you see on the screen by searching (in XP) or selecting (in Vista) the relevant tags.