Circa notebooks

I have been a Levenger junkie for going on fifteen years now, and my latest addiction is their Circa line of notebooks.  About a year ago when working on some appeals I really got to liking working on briefs that were spiral-bound and would lay flat, and started having draft briefs spiral bound to redline.  I could lay them down and edit and fel like I was reading a book.  But that's a pain to punch and bind, and you can't take out or insert things very easily.
Cira, on the other hand, essentially works like a spiral-bound notebook, but you can punch and insert and take out things very easily.  (The punching is actually not very easy, as only a few sheets at a time can be punched, and it's not unusual to misalign the pages).  The travel puncher is ingenious, but it requires even more work, and you look like a complete idiot at meetings stamping every couple of sheets four times to get them into your weird little notebook.
The really nice thing is that the notebooks themselves are small - no thicker than needed, which beats lugging around half-empty notebooks on trips - and because the covers fold around flat, they take the place of a note pad.  That saves a lot of space in my briefcase on trips.
Now I started using Circa for my local patent rules notebook about two years ago - the format is well-suited for a notebook that you refer to frequently and need to put things in and take things out often.  Then a few weeks ago I started binding pending motions and seminar papers I was working on in clear covers - I'll stick a cover sheet and a set of tabs and I can keep all the materials I need for a particular motion (motion, response, reply, cases) or seminar paper (draft paper, cases, research materials) in one place where it can be laid flat to work on. I also started printing everything double-sided because I very much prefer reading that way - a double-sided sheet bound in a notebook.  The tables of contents lay on top under the clear covere and I scribble down what I'm adding.
Then a month or so ago I got a brown leather set of covers and started putting what I needed to read or work on in it, scribbling titles onto a table of contents as I took things out and put new things in.
This has been a hugely good idea.  I stick double-sided copies of cases, draft motions, memos, articles - anything I want - into it, and read them as I have time.  When I go to court I transfer the contents of the applicable plastic sleeve (which is how I track pending things - sort of my equivalent to GTD "working" files) or clear notebook into a tab of the working notebook (which is what I call my brown leather one) and go.  Two weeks ago I took my patent rules and working notebooks to a hearing and the lawyer attending said I was the best organized person he'd ever seen.  I used one notebook to refer to, and took notes on some punched note paper in the other, switching out pages as needed.  The notebook organizes my reading for me, and - probably most important of all - it makes reading and editing much easier because the papers are bound in a notebook that I can read just like a book.
Theoretically, all of this could be files on my laptop and I could read it there, but laptops take way too long to boot up, and I can't annotate files on them nearly as easily - or move the files into different notebooks and folders as needed.  Plus, I just like reading and highlighting on paper.
The system is not perfect my any means - the clear notebooks are insanely expensive, and the circles that act as rings nearly as much so, so much that you can't even think about storing materials in them.  Fortunately you can take the pages and retire them into manila folders, or two-hole punch (as I do) and retire them into notebooks.  You have to deal with Circa turds and ragged edges, it's true, but in notebooks, that's really not been a problem.
The other problem is that there's no way to label a Circa notebook on its spine, so when it's standing on a shelf or lying in a hanging folder you cannot tell what it is.  The cover can look great, but the system doesn't have a way of labeling the spine, which limits how many you can use at one time - which is one reason I try to work out of a working notebook - because I can recognize it easily.  They do have different colored rings, but given that you often need different sizes, I chose to get all mine in black and just live with the spine problem for now.
So, this is one of my favorite toys at the moment.