If you’re cutting and pasting briefs off the internet, you’re not doing it right. If you’re just copying stuff down, you’re not doing it right either.
You’re paying a lot of money and spending a lot of time to learn this stuff. Read the squibs and note cases, write out a few sentences or paragraph or whatever with the holding and how it relates to the primary case, and then see what your prof says. You’ll figure it out. No one knows what the hell is going on the first few weeks, anyway.
I only ever took notes on the note cases when the professor brought them up. I saw no point in taking notes on a number of cases the professor didn’t care about at all.
At the very least, OP needs to read what’s been assigned. If he finds it useless to take notes on squibs, that’s fine, but it won’t do him any good to just paste something into his briefs or notes on the off chance he gets cold called. Those cases are a half page at the most, so there’s no reason not to spend 10 minutes reading and understanding them.
sorry i was talking about cases in general not just squibs, which probably wasn’t clear. anyway, yea, you should probably read all the assignments. i’m just saying it’s not really necessary to take notes before class or brief or whatever (which is kind of common knowledge on tls i think?). but if you have a prof who asks lame, specific questions on cold calls, then sometimes canned briefs can be useful cause they usually have a pretty detailed explanation of the bullshit like procedural history and facts.
TITCR for me. If a professor spends time on the note cases in class then I’ll read them; if not, I generally just skim. It largely depends though. For example: my con law professor discussed note cases but I didn’t read them and used the Chemerinsky supplement to cover that material in a more succinct fashion. Totally a judgement call IMO.
All that said, if it’s your first law school semester, you should probably just read everything. That’s what I did. You can learn what corners to cut later.