Outlaw Practice support taking simple and formatted notes from nearly anywhere in the application. There is also support for discussion-style notes.

Anywhere you see the Notes and Attachments box you can start taking notes. You will see two types of notes supported: Simple Note and Formatted Note.

A simple note is a plain text note with a title but no formatting at all. Think TextPad. Some people prefer this format as it makes it very easy to take notes without worrying about formatting. If you are a perfectionist, you might really appreciate this.

To get a simple note, just click on the Note button.

A formatted note is a note with a title and rich text formatting. Think NotePad or Word (without all of the heavyweight functions that you never use). There is support for a variety of fonts, font sizes, bold/text/underline, indentation of paragraphs, bullet lists, numbered lists, font colors and background colors. In addition, you can add hyperlinks, images and even videos (although it probably makes more sense to attach those separately unless they only make sense in context of the larger note).

Like any boxes, you can maximize the content so that it takes up the full window, which is handy when you are on a call with a client and are furiously taking notes.

You can search for a note using the Search box in the Notes and Attachments box. This will do a text search on the text and formatted text notes belonging to this task/lead/case/etc.

You can also search using the global Search box at the top of the application. This works exactly the same. Note that the Notes and Attachments box will also search PDFs (if they were scanned using OCR) or Microsoft Office documents. See the article on Documents and Attachments.

Important Note: the Documents and Attachments box will show notes from not only the current item, but also related items. For example, if you are in a case record, you will see notes from the lead, the clients' contacts, and any tasks related to any of those.

Private discussions are separate from notes. By putting notes in this section you are expressly indicating that these notes are not part of the client file (check with your state's guidelines on what is considered 'in the client file' to determine whether they are discoverable).

Needless to say, this is note a good place to rant about the client. Rather, this is a good place to add status about the task/lead/case/etc., so that when another user looks at the record, they get some context as to what has been done, what follow-up is required, etc.

Each discussion note will have a timestamp and the name of the user that authored the note. It will also indicate where the comment was made (if not in the current record). For example, if this is a case record, you will see conversations notes from any tasks related to the case, or from the client's contact records.