I Tested Dozens of Systems. Only One Made Me Remember Legal Cases 3 Months Later
Because it is specifically designed to improve retention and recall
Hey there!
By the end of my first semester, I had everything organized. Beautiful Obsidian vault. Color-coded folders. Linked notes connecting Contracts to Torts to Civil Procedure.
And I bombed my first practice exam.
Here’s what I learned: Organization doesn’t equal retention. You can have the most elegant note-taking system in the world, but if you can’t recall Hadley v. Baxendale1 when you need it on an exam, what’s the point?
Most law students are optimizing for the wrong thing. We obsess over how to capture information. We don’t think about how to make it stick.
If you only use ONE tool for law school, it needs to solve the retention problem, not just the organization problem.
That tool is RemNote.
Let me show you why.
The problem isn’t taking notes. It’s remembering them when it matters.
Law school rewards recall, not recognition.
You can have perfect case briefs. You can highlight every important holding. You can outline for weeks.
But when you’re sitting in an exam with a blank page and a complex fact pattern, none of that matters unless you can actually remember the rule from Pennoyer v. Neff2 and apply it under pressure.
Most note-taking tools assume you’ll review your notes before the exam. The research is clear: that doesn’t work. Your brain doesn’t retain information through passive review.
You need active recall. You need spaced repetition. You need a system that forces you to retrieve information from memory repeatedly over time.
That’s not how most study systems work. That’s exactly how RemNote works.
RemNote is built on the science of memory, not the aesthetics of organization.
Here’s what makes RemNote different from every other note-taking tool:
It’s designed around spaced repetition, the scientifically-proven method for long-term retention. When you create a note in RemNote, you’re not just storing information. You’re creating a flashcard that RemNote will quiz you on at precisely calculated intervals.
The first time you see a concept, RemNote might quiz you the next day. If you remember it, maybe three days later. Then a week. Then two weeks. Then a month.
This is not optional. This is how memory works.
Your brain doesn’t retain information through exposure. It retains information through retrieval. Every time you force yourself to recall something, you strengthen that memory pathway.
RemNote automates this process. You take notes like normal. RemNote turns them into an active learning system.
You can take notes and build your flashcard deck at the same time.
Most students treat note-taking and flashcard creation as separate tasks. That is, if they create flashcards at all (I didn’t).
You sit in class. You take notes. Later, you make flashcards from your notes. Then you review the flashcards. Then you go back to your notes to study.
That’s three separate systems. Three places to maintain. Three opportunities to fall behind.
RemNote consolidates all of this into a single workflow.
When you’re reading Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., you create a note: “What is the zone of danger test?”3 You tag it as a flashcard. Done.
You’re taking notes. You’re building your spaced repetition deck. Same action. One tool.
By the time you finish your case reading for the week, you’ll have already created the review system you’ll use for the rest of the semester.
No separate flashcard app. No rewriting your notes into Quizlet. No duplication.
RemNote forces you to think in hierarchies, which is how law actually works.
Legal concepts are nested. Understanding negligence requires understanding duty, breach, causation, and damages. Understanding duty requires understanding foreseeability. Understanding foreseeability requires understanding Palsgraf and Cardozo’s majority opinion.
RemNote’s structure mirrors how law actually works: hierarchical and interconnected.
You create a top-level concept: Negligence. Underneath, you create sub-concepts: Duty, Breach, Causation, Damages. Underneath each, you add the cases, rules, and exceptions. Or you can keep it simple and just lump everything together into the **Class** folder and sort it out later (or not). Either way, you still get the benefit of spaced recognition and improved retention.
When RemNote quizzes you, it doesn’t just ask isolated facts. It tests you on the relationship between concepts. You’re not just memorizing rules. You’re building a mental model of how the law fits together.
This is what professors mean when they say “think like a lawyer.” They mean see the structure. See how concepts nest and relate.
RemNote makes that structure explicit.
It works across devices and survives without an internet connection.
You’re in the library. Your Wi-Fi dies. Your cloud-based note app becomes useless.
RemNote works offline. You can take notes, create flashcards, and review your spaced repetition queue without an internet connection. When you reconnect, everything syncs.
This matters more than you think. Law school happens in courthouses, in study rooms with bad Wi-Fi, on planes, in places where connectivity isn’t guaranteed.
Your study system shouldn’t depend on being online.
The learning curve is real, but the payoff is worth it.
I’m not going to lie to you: RemNote has a learning curve.
It’s not as flexible as Notion. It’s not as visually polished as Obsidian. The interface can feel dense when you first open it.
But here’s what I learned: the tools that are easiest to start with are often the least effective long-term.
Notion is like a turbo-charged race car, but you have to assemble it yourself. Obsidian is elegant for connecting ideas, but it won’t quiz you three days later to see if you still remember the holding from Shelley v. Kraemer4. Yes, I know that there are plug-ins that attempt to add spaced repetition to Obsidian, but they are clunky and difficult to use. Using a tool specifically designed for spaced repetition is far more effective and efficient. There are also plug-ins that link Obsidian to Anki, which is even worse.
RemNote makes you work a little harder upfront because it’s designed around how memory actually functions, not how note-taking aesthetically feels.
Give it two weeks. Learn the keyboard shortcuts. Build your first 50 flashcards. Start doing your daily reviews.
By week three, you’ll notice something: you’re actually remembering cases you studied two weeks ago. Not because you crammed. Not because you re-read your notes. Because RemNote made you retrieve that information from memory at the right intervals.
That’s when the tool clicks. That’s when you realize you’re not just taking notes anymore. You’re building long-term retention.
You don’t need six tools. You need the RIGHT one.
I tested Anki (too manual, too much friction). I tested Quizlet (too simplistic, no hierarchy). Brainscape is better than Quizlet, but still doesn’t have other question types (like multiple choice or short answer with typed-in responses). I tested Notion (beautiful, but passive). I tested Obsidian (great for linking, bad for retention). I tested more PKM systems than I can even count.
Each tool does one thing well. None of them solve the core problem: making you remember what you learn. With RemNote, you can even designate that you have a quiz on a portion of your notes, and it will reconfigure your repetition schedule to ensure that you’re ready for the quiz. There are different repetition schedules algorithms that you can use for different topics if you really get into it. As geeky as I am, even I have never gone that far.
RemNote is the only tool I’ve found that combines note-taking, spaced repetition, hierarchical structure, and active recall into one system.
If you’re going to invest time learning one tool, make it the tool that solves the most important problem: retention. When your classes end for the semester, don’t delete the RemNote folder; just flag it as “paused,” so it doesn’t keep testing you on that topic. But the information and questions are still there when the time comes for bar exam preparation, and you can return them to “active” to start practicing again as part of your bar prep.
RemNote can be free. Upgrading to a paid tier is not expensive. It is worth it.
You can use the basic, highly-capable version of RemNote for no charge.
Upgrading to the $6/month tier (paid annually at $72/year) adds many features and is well worth it.
The highest level tier is $16/month ($192/year), and that’s the one I use. The highest level tier is called “RemNote AI”, but don’t let it scare you off. This is an AI fine-tuned to help reach RemNote’s full potential. For example, if you answer a multiple-choice question incorrectly, RemNote AI will explain each possible answer and why it is correct or incorrect. For people who took Property class with me, it’s like a mini Vu-Dinh “autopsy” but without the pain of doing it yourself.
Start small. One class. One week.
You don’t need to migrate everything into RemNote today. You don’t need to rebuild your entire note system. I still keep all my primary notes in Obsidian because I love the way I can link things together. That Shelley v. Kraemer case? My case brief for that one is linked to my Property notes and my Constitutional Law notes. The NFIB v. Sebelius5 case is ubiquitous - I swear every class in the last year has referred to it at least once. Obsidian does that beautifully, so I love Obsidian for that. But the fact that NFIB v. Sebelius appears everywhere means it also pops up often in my spaced-repetition practice.
Pick one class. This week, take your case briefs in RemNote. Turn your rules into flashcards as you go. Do your daily reviews for five minutes each morning.
That’s it.
After one week, you’ll know if it works for you. You’ll know if the retention is real. You’ll know if it’s worth continuing.
My guess? By week two, you’ll be moving your other classes into RemNote.
Because once you experience actually remembering what you studied three weeks ago without cramming, you won’t want to go back.
Here’s my personal invitation link to RemNote. Yes, if you sign up for a paid subscription, I will get some extra, free time added to my paid subscription, but the choice is yours. If compensated links bother you, I understand, but don’t let that stop you from trying out a genuinely useful study aid. Just sign up at the main RemNote website, try it on your own, and if you like it (and I think you will), just give me a thumbs-up here on Substack.
I’d love to hear what you think after you try it.
Hadley v. Baxendale - in contract law, a breaching party is liable only for those risks reasonably foreseeable at the time of contracting.
Pennoyer v. Neff, 95 U.S. 714 (1878), is the U.S. Supreme Court case that established limits on state court personal jurisdiction. While the rules it established were heavily modified by International Shoe, it remains important for understanding in personam and in rem jurisdiction. But you didn’t really come here for a discussion of civil procedure, did you?
A plaintiff may recover only if physically impacted or placed in immediate risk of physical harm by the defendant’s negligence, i.e., within the zone of danger. Now, get back to the important stuff.
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), held that racially restrictive covenants in property deeds cannot be enforced by courts because such enforcement is unconstitutional state action under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Personally, I love this case because of the small-town Black attorney (George L. Vaughn) who attended a no-name law school, yet took the case to the Supreme Court and won. He’s a hero of mine.
Nope, we’re not going to get into the NFIB v. Sebelius case. It really had multiple implications across the legal field that are just too much to cover here. Short answer: the ACA’s individual mandate was legal, but the members of the Supreme Court had to contort themselves into pretzels to do it.