Digital Trial Notebook Implementation: Practical Applications of OneNote, Word, Excel, Outlook and More

Kathleen (Katie) Brown, Associate Dean for Information Resources | Charleston School of Law

Kathleen (Katie) Brown is the Associate Dean for Information Resources at the Charleston School of Law, where she brings together deep expertise in law librarianship, legal research, and legal technology. Her scholarship and teaching span intellectual property, acting skills for lawyers, law and literature, management, and a wide range of legal research topics, reflecting an unusually interdisciplinary approach that connects the practice of law with communication, performance, and emerging technology.

• Education & Credentials

Katie earned her J.D. from Seattle University School of Law in 2005, with an emphasis in intellectual property law, and her M.S. in Library and Information Science from Drexel University. She also holds a B.F.A. from DePaul University. While in law school, she served as a library intern at Seattle University Law School and volunteered with Washington Lawyers for the Arts.

• Recognition & Leadership

Katie is an active member of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), where she has held a variety of leadership roles across chapters and special interest sections. She served as Chair of the Annual Meeting Program Committee for the 2020 AALL Annual Meeting in New Orleans, and in 2011 she was honored to serve a three-year term on the AALL Executive Board.

• Professional Involvement

Beyond her institutional role, Katie is a longtime contributor to the law library and legal education communities through her committee service and leadership within AALL. She previously served as an Adjunct Faculty member in the Meinders School of Business Master of Science in Energy Legal Studies program in Oklahoma. She is also a published author whose work spans legal research, intellectual property, and the art of lawyering. In her spare time, she brings a distinctive outside perspective as a WFTDA-certified roller derby referee, and she draws on an earlier career as an acting instructor in Chicago.

• Experience

Katie has taught specialized, beginner, and advanced legal research courses, as well as seminar and doctrinal courses including Legal Technology for Practice, Art of Advocacy, Contracts, and the research component of Legal Research and Writing. Her research and teaching interests center on contracts, legal research, the art of lawyering, and legal technology for practice. Combining her backgrounds in law, library science, and performance, she offers students and practitioners a unique blend of rigorous research instruction and practical advocacy skills—and her prior experience as an acting instructor informs her distinctive work on acting skills for lawyers.

SESSION 1 – Building the Trial Notebook: Organizing Trial Materials in OneNote and Managing Case Documents in Word | Kathleen (Katie) Brown | 2:30pm – 3:30pm

This session shows how to build a digital trial notebook in OneNote and Word, with a focus on structure, search, and document discipline. It covers the move away from OneNote for Windows 10, how to lay out a notebook so materials can be found quickly, and Word habits that matter in litigation: co-authoring, tracked changes, templates and styles, and cleaning metadata. It also looks at Copilot in OneNote and the Legal Agent in Word from a research-verification angle, explaining where AI output can support trial preparation and where it has to be checked against primary sources.

BREAK | 3:30pm – 3:40pm

SESSION 2 – Running the Trial Notebook: Tracking Deadlines in Outlook and Excel, Collaborating in Microsoft Teams | Kathleen (Katie) Brown | 3:40pm – 4:40pm

This session covers the day-to-day running of the trial notebook: tracking deadlines, collaborating, and preserving evidence across Microsoft 365. It explains what the new Outlook default changes for calendaring and add-ins, then walks through a dual-docket system that pairs Outlook with an Excel deadline calculator. The session closes with Microsoft Teams, treated both as a workspace for the trial team and as a source of discoverable evidence. Topics include how to set up channels and permissions, what preservation duties apply, and the ethics of transcripts and recaps that AI generates from meetings.