On the Case and Halsbury’s Legal Terms – free
Both apps from legal publishers LesixNexis allow students to access digests of more than 300,000 cases and 3,500 definitions of legal terms and phrases. On the Case allows you to search for cases by name, citation or keyword, and gives each case a status signal indicating how judges have treated them. To access login details, students should download the LexisLibrary apps on the iPhone, open the app and click on the “academic” link. After completing the registration form using only your academic email address, an email will be sent to your university email with login details. But beware: both are currently only available on iPhone.
iLegal Legislation – £49.99 annually/£149.99 lifetime subscription
Designed by law student Timothy Leigh, this app claims to “put the law in your pocket”, enabling you to access almost all UK, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales primary legislation as well as acts of parliament. It contains all the text of legislation available at legislation.gov.uk, and the information is helpfully stored offline on your device. It comes with a hefty price tag – but there is a seven-day free trial to try it out first.
CamScanner or Tiny Scanner – free
These document-scanning apps pretty much do what they say on the tin, allowing you to quickly scan documents and handwritten notes into PDF images.
Dictamus – £12.99
This app will save the hand-ache of scribbling away in lectures by turning your phone into a dictaphone.
RefME – free
This referencing tool is a useful shortcut to gathering all those footnotes, endnotes and citations for essays, allowing you to scan the barcodes from the journals or books from which you are quoting.
iStudiez Pro – £2.29
Helps you keep your assignments and calendar events in order.
Evernote – free
You can use Evernote to jot down your thoughts, ideas, images, to-do lists, and makes them available and searchable across all of your devices.
Citrix QuickEdit – free
Lets you create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and work on all of your Microsoft Office and PDF files. You can access them anywhere, with cloud storage support for ShareFile, DropBox, Box, Google and others.
Dropbox or Google Drive – free
Store all your notes, documents and pictures on the cloud, and access them from any of your devices.
My Legal Places – free
Really useful during work experience, this app provides the map locations and full contact details for police stations, courts, Citizens Advice Bureaux and community legal offices.
OnTrees – free
Helps you manage your money. You can link up all of your accounts and get an up to date view of your balances. It sorts your spending into categories such as food, travel, entertainment and bills, so you can see where your maintenance loan is going.
News apps – free
Keeping up to speed with legal news as well as general current affairs is essential for developing your critical and analytical thinking skills – but sifting through it all to find the good stuff can be time-consuming. Trade magazines and online legal titles are highly recommended for more focused news:
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Legal Cheek
- Law Society Gazette
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ABA Journal
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LexisNexis Newsdesk
- The Guardian/Observer(!) – two-week free digital trial
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