Almost every candidate makes notes. A much smaller number ever revise from them productively. The gap is usually a design problem rather than a discipline problem.
Notes are for a stranger
The person who will read your notes is not you today. It is you in eight months, having forgotten the context entirely.
That reader does not remember which lecture prompted a line, what the abbreviation meant, or why a point seemed important. Notes written for present-you are compressed against context that will not survive.
Write for the stranger. It costs a little more now and is the entire difference between notes that work and notes that get abandoned.
Copying is not note-making
Reproducing a passage in your own handwriting feels productive and does almost nothing, because it can be done without deciding anything.
Useful note-making requires decisions: what matters, what can go, how this connects to something else. If you finish a session without having discarded most of what you read, you transcribed rather than took notes.
One page per topic, enforced
An artificial constraint is the most effective forcing device available.
Limit each topic to a single page. The limit forces prioritisation, and prioritisation is what makes notes revisable. Twelve pages on a topic is a second textbook, and you already have one of those.
When the page fills and something important remains, something else has to go. That decision is the work.
Write questions, not only statements
Notes made entirely of statements can only be reread. Notes containing questions can be used for retrieval.
Leave a margin with questions your notes answer. Later, cover the page and try to answer them. This converts a passive document into a testing tool, and retrieval rather than rereading is what actually builds recall.
Date them and mark provision references
Two small habits that pay off disproportionately.
Date each page, so that when a statute is amended or reorganised you know instantly which notes predate the change and need checking.
Mark provision numbers distinctly rather than burying them in prose, so a later verification pass against the bare act is quick. Secondary material lags legislative change, sometimes badly, and your own notes are secondary material.
Do not make notes on everything
A common and expensive habit is treating comprehensive note coverage as the goal.
Notes are most valuable for material that is hard to hold, easy to confuse, or connects across areas. For material you find straightforward, the notes will never be reread and making them was the cost of a false sense of completeness.
The test of a good set
Open a topic page from six months ago and ask whether you can reconstruct the topic from it in ten minutes.
If yes, the notes work. If you find yourself returning to the textbook to understand your own page, the notes were written for the wrong reader, and rewriting that page now is a better use of an hour than making three new ones.