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A Lawyer's System for Active Reading

By Craig Tashman
July 01, 2023

Reading is foundational to lawyers' work. Whatever matter a lawyer is working on, the facts and the arguments are captured in prose. Reading is likewise how lawyers maintain and hone their craft, reading to keep abreast of changes in the law and "maintain the requisite knowledge and skill" in representing clients by continuing study and education (ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.1 and Comment 8). This type of reading goes beyond the passive reading of a magazine, newspaper or novel. It requires a richer and more robust interaction with text, known as active reading.

Active reading comprises many daily tasks lawyers engage in, including highlighting, annotating, note taking, comparing and searching texts. It demands more than flipping or turning pages. Lawyers need to create, find and compare a variety of annotations, margin notes and highlights, race among multiple sections of text and return to pinpoints in supporting documents on demand. Paper supports many active reading tasks, and with advances in hardware and software, computers are getting better at building an increasingly paper-like experience. But neither is the sine qua non of active reading.

I devoted my doctoral research and embarked on a career to develop a system tailored to the needs of active readers, especially attorneys. By studying the limitations of past systems, we created a fluidlike representation of text where lawyers can restructure, revisualize and rearrange primary and secondary sources, annotations and highlights to meet the demands of a client, project or study. This article details my journey: Defining active reading processes and noting some requirements that support it, discussing how paper and current computer systems fall short of lawyers' active reading requirements and outlining the features of an active reading system for lawyers.

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