I've been in law enforcement for about 5 years now, the first 3 of which were spent entirely on felony-level criminal investigations. They teach a great deal at the federal courses on how to conduct interviews of Suspects, Victims, and Witnesses, but almost nothing is detailed on how to take notes. When I conducted these interviews (especially ones that aren't recorded or when I'm unlikely to have a chance to re-interview someone, such as with Suspects and Victims), I found that I really needed a methodology of note-taking that allowed me to set aside questions to ask when the time was right. For example, if a sexual assault victim is describing the events that led up to the assault, and mentioned that the suspect sent a message from his phone just before doing something else, I would want to know (to the best of her knowledge) what type of phone it was, but I'm not going to stop her in the middle of telling me the story just to ask that question.<p>Interestingly, I basically started doing something extremely similar to this system (although, apparently backwards). My notes always included a line separating my main notes on the left from my key details and questions on the right, with the right column only about 3" wide. Ordinarily, I would leave 2 or 3 blank lines after each question so I could fill in the answer the interviewee provided and it reminded me to look for any blank space on my notepad before ending an interview (or, in the case of suspects, before asking more direct questions that may lead to suspect to end the interview before I got the chance to get answers to more minor questions). Ofter, my "summary" section would be extremely short and just describe larger timeline changes, like if a report spans multiple days or locations, I would mark the end of one incident in the bottom few lines of the page and jump to a new page to take notes about the next incident.<p>I'm very curious if this methodology is used by a lot of others as well (especially in law enforcement), or if I just happened to find one with remarkable similarity to Cornell's.