Crush 1L Year With AI-Powered Tools: Lesson 5.

ChatGPT and Claude: Your AI Note-Taking Sidekicks

As students, we all know the importance of taking great notes during lectures. You’ll rely on those quality notes later for writing briefs, essays, and exam prep. Manually capturing every detail and retrieving those later is not always easy, but chat models ChatGPT by OpenAI and Claude by Anthropic can definitely help!

Let’s teach these models to be your personal note-taking assistants. Simply start a chat and give the instruction:

We start a chat by giving specific instructions for the model to follow

As your professor covers key points, summarize them in the chat using line breaks to separate ideas (SHIFT + ENTER to remain in the same text window, or ENTER — to start a new one).

Here are some notes taken during the first lecture in Con Law class.

The model will store these notes and can later respond to questions like “Summarize the first lecture”, “What were the key points about Heller?” or “What is the founding intent?”.

Claude has just introduced the added bonus of allowing you to upload documents, like the full Heller opinion, that you can also use for reference during your chat.

Here, we uploaded the full Heller opinion. Claude “read” and summarized it. You may ask questions like “What were Breyer’s arguments in Heller?”

The only catch is there is a limit on the amount of documents one may upload in the same chat instance.

Another good use of these models is to have them fix your disorganized or messy notes. For example, you could provide the AI with your raw notes and the template like this:

Your notes:

talked about negligence — reasonable person standard

3 elements — duty breach causation

palsgraf case — no duty to unforeseeable plaintiff

proximate cause — scope of risk matters

The template:

[Date] [Course] [Professor] [Lecture Title]

Key Points:

Cases Discussed:

Concepts Covered:

Additional Notes:

Follow Up:

Both ChatGPT and Claude will reformat your notes according to the provided template. This takes the jumbled information and organizes it neatly into labeled sections, making it much easier to review, study from, and add to later. Having an AI assistant instantly structure and formalize your rough notes can save you tons of time.

While both have pros and cons, ChatGPT and Claude bring us closer to effortless, foolproof note-taking and subsequent retrieval.

Going forward, even more effective would be AIs that can listen to lectures and automatically create outlines, which we ‘ll discuss how to do in the next lecture. But for now, ChatGPT and Claude are great tools to keep your notes organized as you progress through the semester. Give it a try for one of your next lectures!