Legal Research and Writing Using Scrivener v. Pages and Evernote: An Approach

David Sparks and Katie Floyd over at MacPowerUsers recently did a podcast on a Mac-only writing tool called Scrivener. (You might want to listen to their discussion before going any further.) As a Mac user and Scrivener owner who gave Scrivener to my English-major daughter for Christmas last year, I share much of David’s enthusiasm for Scrivener. It’s a wonderful program if you’re writing a novel or a screenplay. But I don’t use it in my practice, and I thought it might be helpful to explain why and to share a different approach to legal research and writing. Thus, the genesis of this long post.

My Problems with Scrivener

Much of my work involves writing federal court briefs in Social Security disability cases. Federal court rules determine how the brief is to be organized and formatted. So when I’m thinking about Scrivener, I’m thinking about it in the context of brief writing. (David drafts contracts and other documents so he works within a larger framework that may weaken my critique.)

My criticism of Scrivener in a law practice is threefold (with a few subfolds thrown in for good measure):

First, the research folder is not so easy to use, requiring you to click or tab into small fields to categorize/summarize the research, and it captures that research in a single Scrivener file, making it difficult to reuse or update that research in a new project.

Second, the split screen feature is nice but in the era of Spaces and dual/triple/quad monitor setups, the split screen isn’t really necessary–you can put your research in another program on a separate monitor and copy and paste to your heart’s content. If you only have a single machine, you can use Leopard’s Spaces feature to switch between research and the main writing area; in any event, using Scrivener’s split screen on a laptop or a single monitor will require scrolling to see what you want to see, another minor annoyance. And it’s not always apparent which screen in the split-screen view has the focus in Scrivener.

Finally, my habit of formatting as I type is frustrated by Scrivener. Of course, Scrivener was not designed to be a full-fledged word processor although it does include basic formatting tools. But when writing briefs, you have to be concerned about page limits. With Scrivener it’s impossible to know if you’re over the limit until you export and format your work–a quibble perhaps, but it’s something you must allow for when using the program.

Scrivener’s greatest strength, as David and Katie point out, is its ability to break up your writing into bite-sized chunks which can be easily rearranged. If I ever write a book or a screenplay, I’d use Scrivener in a heartbeat for just this reason. But for briefs, I take a different approach.

Legal Research and Writing Using Pages and Evernote

I use Pages and Evernote to write briefs. At the outset, I have to confess that using two programs to accomplish what David does with one program violates my New Year’s Resolution to simplify; i.e., to learn, use and “go deep” with a single program whenever possible. Why use two programs when one program will do? For several reasons:

• Pages now has the full screen feature that Scrivener has (invoked with Option + Cmd + U).
• Pages now has an outline mode (which may have some potential to mimic Scrivener’s outline feature but I haven’t yet used it).
• Pages can open Word documents and save documents to .doc and .docx formats.
• Pages also handles merges with data from my practice management software.
• Because I like to format as I go (footnotes, blockquotes, pagination, etc.), I wanted to avoid the added steps of exporting my work from Scrivener into Pages, then formatting the document. It feels like a waste of time even if it’s not.

For these and a few other reasons, I almost never use TextEdit, Scrivener or Word. I try to focus on Pages.

Which leads to the question of what to do with the research. David describes in the podcast how he uses Scrivener’s research folder to manage all the research related to a particular project. It certainly works as David described, but for some reason, I just don’t click with the interface. It feels “cramped” to me in terms of the way the fields describing the research are displayed, and it’s more difficult to get information into Scrivener than Evernote. I’m sure the interface presents no problem for many, if not most, users. It’s more a personal preference. And gnawing at the back of my mind is the fact that the research that goes into this particular Scrivener file can’t be easily shared with the next project that comes along. Since disability cases often raise similar issues, having ready access to research I may have done a year ago is very important to me. Scrivener makes it difficult to get at that research.

I prefer Evernote to Scrivener as a research repository. The interface is cleaner. It’s easier to get information into Evernote. And, of course, the information that goes into Evernote (a copy of a webpage, a PDF file, a photograph, an audio and/or video file) is accessible anytime. It’s not chained to a single scrivener file.

To use Evernote to manage research, I simply create a notebook called Research or Office or something similar and dump all the cases, photos, videos and text documents related to the project in that folder. It’s as easy as right clicking a webpage and sending the page to Evernote. I name the doc, add multiple tags (VERY IMPORTANT-see below) and I’m done.

The Importance of Tagging

Many attorneys have been trying to find a way to use Evernote in their practices. As a repository for legal research, Evernote has real promise. Tagging is the key that unlocks its power. Here’s how I use it:

Assume I’m writing a brief for a client named Nelson. If I’m doing research in Google Scholar or anywhere else on the internet, when I find an item I want to include in my research notebook, I simply clip it, assign it to the Research notebook (if I haven’t already made Research the default notebook via Evernote’s preferences), then tag it with nelsonbrief (or nelson or whatever else uniquely identifies that client). Then all research tagged nelsonbrief can be displayed in Evernote with a few clicks of the mouse.

But, of course, you are not limited to assigning a single tag to an item in Evernote. You can give any piece of data multiple tags. So, continuing the example, when I read a case on point and clip it to the Research notebook, it gets the nelsonbrief tag, but it might also get the following tags: 7th, cases, posner, due process, 2009. Now that research can be used for the Nelson brief, but it’s also accessible in other ways. If need be, I can search Evernote for all the cases I’ve collected, or all 7th Circuit cases, or all 7th Circuit cases decided in 2009, or all cases authored by Judge Posner, or all cases addressing a due process issue, and so forth. And I can save as many of these searches as I want in Evernote. Over time, I’ll build up a body of legal research that can be accessed either by creating a new search or using an existing search to find what I’m looking for.

(As an aside, with Google Scholar all the links contained within a case remain live when they are imported into Evernote. So if you click a link and want to include that case in your research, just clip it and tag it and you’re done. Very slick.)

Rearranging Arguments in Pages

Okay, organizing research in Evernote seems simple enough but how do I do what Scrivener does so well; namely, reorder, rearrange and otherwise manipulate my writing without getting lost in the document? Admittedly, Pages is not nearly as elegant or intuitive as Scrivener in this regard but it can be done using bookmarks and section breaks.

As a preliminary matter, think of a typical brief. Much of the brief is boilerplate language: the introduction, the statement of the case, the statement of the facts, the summary of the argument, the standard of review, the argument, the conclusion, the certificate of service. Lots of sections but only a few that really need to be rearranged–maybe the facts section and the argument section. With that in mind, here’s what I do.

First, I create a template in Pages that contains the boilerplate to be used in the caption, the intro, the standard of review, etc. Second, I put merge keys within the boilerplate. This means that the client’s name, the defendant’s name, the pronouns associated with the client (him/her, she/he, etc.) are dumped into the merge document when I create the brief (something that can’t be done in Scrivener.) Finally, I bookmark the template; that is, each section of the brief is assigned a bookmark. The bookmarks are accessible via the Inspector. So when I’m writing in Pages, I go to full screen view (opt + cmd + u), then open the inspector (opt + cmd + i) and open the bookmark section. A list of all bookmarks appears, which can be sorted either by name or by page number. I can go to the beginning of any of the sections of the brief by clicking on a bookmark. A new argument gets a new bookmark. (There is no bookmark keyboard shortcut in Pages. I created one in Keyboard Preferences within OSX.) So bookmarks take care of basic navigation throughout the document. They are part of the template file so every time a new brief is created, the brief contains boilerplate language and bookmarks for each section of the brief.

But what if you want to move an argument from one section of the brief to another? With Scrivener it’s as easy as drag and drop. With Pages, it’s as easy as drag and drop but it requires that you use section breaks. Not as elegant as Scrivener, not as easy to use, but it works. Here’s how:

If my argument contains three or four points, I might create section breaks for each of these points right off the bat. As I work within the argument, I can subdivide each argument with more section breaks as needed. (By the way, a section break starts a new page. Section breaks appear in the document when Invisibles are turned on. They are also visible as a yellow border around one or more pages in the page thumbnails view.) If an argument is contained in a separate section, you open page thumbnails view (opt + cmd + P), and drag that section to its new location. (When you have the arrangement you like, you’ll need to delete the section breaks by using the find feature in Pages.)

The result is that with bookmarks and section breaks, you don’t get lost in the document. You can quickly navigate to a particular section of the brief via bookmarks. You can rearrange your blocks of writing by dragging sections within the page thumbnails view. It’s not nearly as elegant as Scrivener, but it gets the job done.

I think there may be a way to use the outline mode in Pages to do some of this in a different way, but I haven’t tried.

A final note. David and Katie mentioned Scrivener’s Snapshot feature, and it has an analog in Pages, found under Format – Advanced – Capture Pages. What this feature does is copy all or part of the current section of the document. You name the copied section and it is then available for pasting by clicking the sections button in the toolbar or Insert – Sections in the menu bar. Like the snapshot feature in Scrivener, you can tackle revisions within a particular section of the document without losing the ability to restore the original section if you later decide your revisions aren’t so good.

Conclusion

So that’s a rough and ready critique of Scrivener as a legal research and writing tool. David and Katie’s discussion inspired me to revisit Scrivener and think about the way I do things. I’ve probably missed something, and there may be simpler ways to do what I’ve described. Frankly, this feels like a bit of a jumble. But I write this with the hope that even if this post is convoluted, it might stimulate more discussion about creative ways to use this really interesting software in our practices.

Your correspondent welcomes all comments and critiques.

Tagged as: software