Hello, everybody. In this episode, let's talk about the basics of briefing cases in law school. Let's talk about it. So if you're heading a law school or you're thinking about going to law school, you've probably heard about how law students are very often drafting case briefs as they read the court decisions that are assigned to them in their 1L classes. So when you start law school, you're going to get a textbook. That textbook is going to be full of court decisions. You're going to read those court decisions to learn the area of law that you're learning about in class. So in your contracts class, you're going to read a bunch of contracts cases. In your torts class, you're going to read a bunch of torts cases. And as you read those opinions, you may create what are called case briefs. What is a case brief? Well, in a lot of ways, a case brief is just a fancy way of saying that you are taking notes about important things as you read that court decision that a judge wrote. A case brief is really just a structured summary of a judicial opinion that distills the opinion down to its essentials so that you can be ready to discuss the case in class, number one, and so that you, number two, can be ready to prepare for your exam by usually creating an outline of your exam answer. Something I'm going to talk about a ton a little bit in this episode, and very much so in other episodes. A case brief is not necessarily a book report or the details of every single thing that happened in the case. It's really your structured roadmap of what the case is about and how it fits into the larger picture of the course. So when I say that a case brief is a structured summary, what I mean is that you will probably put the same kind of information in every case brief that you write. And we're going to go over in this episode what kind of information that is. And in that structured summary, you're going to include the brass tacks, the things that are really important for you to be able to understand how you can use that case to better learn that area of law so that you can discuss it in class and ultimately the most important thing, do better on your exam. Why are you briefing cases? Why do law students do this? Why don't law students just read the cases and underline or take some notes in the margins of the book? Why is it that law students brief cases? Well, one is just for the sake of active reading. These are really tough readings. They can be really confusing. Some of them are harder than others, but in general, if you are briefing the case, if you are taking notes as you are reading it, you are going to force yourself to engage with the case and engage with what the court decision is about rather than just passively read in a way that might not be quite as effective at retaining information. And some, when you take notes, you tend to learn things better. That's what case briefing helps you with. It also helps you organize the court decision into a structured way in a manner that is going to help you learn the material better. So cases are going to present information to you, usually in a pretty predictable order, but sometimes key information can be a little less organized in the judge's written opinion than what you will put in your case brief. Why is that? Well, these cases span different centuries. Some of them are super old court decisions written by judges long ago in a very different style than what you might get from a judge today. There will be trial court decisions and appellate court decisions. All of these could be written a little bit differently. And so by briefing, you're going to structure the information that you're getting in a way that's going to be effective. Another reason to brief cases is so that you can be prepared to answer questions about the case in class when your professor calls on you. We're going to talk about how professors use the Socratic method in other podcast episodes in more detail. But the basics of it are that you're going to walk into class and your professor, maybe with or without notice, is going to call on you in front of everyone and say, let's talk about this case. And they're going to ask you questions about the facts of the case, the issue in the case, and the holding that the court reached. And the expectation is that you are going to be able to succinctly answer questions about it and then ask hypothetical questions. Well, what would happen if the facts of the case changed in this way or in that way? How would that affect the outcome of this case? How would that affect the arguments that the parties in the case might make? So you're going to be called upon to answer those questions. And it can be really hard to do that if you don't have a succinct summary of the case in front of you. You may have read three or four cases that day for two classes. You know, you could read over a dozen cases a week for multiple classes. And so by having that case brief, you'll be able to flip to something really quickly and say, ah, I remember the notes that I took on this, what I wrote down about this. I'm reasonably more prepared to answer questions about it. In contrast, if you didn't take those notes and you just had to flip through your case book, you won't be as well prepared for that class participation. The most important reason why you should brief cases in law school, though, in my opinion, is to better prepare yourself for issue spotter exams at the end of the semester. So throughout the semester, you're going to be creating an outline of what your exam answer will look like. Briefing the cases, writing down all those details in a half page or so, is going to serve as a quick reference for outlining and identifying what the rule is that will go in your outline and that will go in your exam answer ultimately. It would be really hard if to build your outline you were relying only on your case textbook because your textbook is intimidatingly thick. It has a lot of information in it. Your outline, in contrast, has to be a really succinct recitation of the law. When you write rule statements that go into your exam answer, they're probably only going to be one or two sentences because what you want to do is get as quickly as possible to a robust discussion of your analysis of the kind of arguments that both parties will make. So it can be really hard to take the cases that you are reading and to summarize them in maybe one to three or four sentences at most that you may deploy on your exam and copy into your exam answer as rule statements. So by briefing the cases, you can think of what you're doing as kind of a funnel approach to preparing your exam answer that you ultimately write on your exam. At the widest part of the funnel, at the very top, you have the court decision that you are reading. And that's got all the information out there. Well, as you learn and start to understand the case more, you want to narrow that court decision down to information that is more important for your exam outline. Your case brief is a way to start narrowing down that information to what's going to be important for the exam. As you continue to work your way down that funnel and the funnel gets narrower, what do you encounter next? The next thing you will prepare on your journey to an exam answer is an outline. That outline, of course, is going to be even narrower than your case brief. It's not going to have all the information that you had in your case brief. You're going to take the case brief and ask yourself, what are the one or two rules that are important out of this? And what do we learn about how those rules were applied in this case as a matter of fact or as a matter of law? And so you will only write a few sentences about the case in your outline. And then finally, your exam answer is just going to deploy the relevant rules from your outline. So your case brief is an important aspect of that funnel. It's going to help you get to that more succinct understanding so that you get down to the things that are really important in order to succeed when you write your exam. And if you skip over that step, if you skip over the case brief, if you say, I'm just going to start writing an outline based on the cases I'm reading, you'll have a tougher time because you won't have gone through the process of narrowing down the information first in a way that also, incidentally, really helps you understand what should go into that exam outline. You'll have a tougher time. You'll be working with a lot more information. It can be overwhelming. You may not do it as well, certainly. You may not as easily identify the information that you need to be worrying about. So that's the why. That's why we brief cases. The next thing I want to talk about are what your case briefs look like. Not everyone briefs the same way, but they typically have a few key components, and they typically follow the same format. You should follow a similar format across your case briefs so that it is easy for you to read them. You don't want inconsistency because that will make it more difficult. Some cases that you read will have more information than others. Some cases that you read in law school will just be a short excerpt and your textbook will not present you with all the facts, for example, or even the legal rule or the legal holding. They might just give you a small excerpt. Well, treat that accordingly. Your case brief is going to look a little slimmer if the textbook doesn't give you as much information about the case. You're only going to include the information that was important in terms of what the textbook is presenting to you. You don't want to or need to go look at any extraneous information that isn't part of the course materials. So what are you likely to try to include in your case briefs to the extent that you are seeing the information when you are reading the court decision? Well, start simple. The first thing that you can look at is the case name and the citation. Why do you want all that? Because you're going to be expected to identify the name of the case in class, right? Your teacher's going to say, Joe, can you talk to me about the Bailey case? And you'll need to flip to it really quick. That is something that you should have at the top of every case brief that you write. You won't necessarily, by the way, talk about cases maybe in as much detail in your exam answer. There are advanced ways for really solid exam answers where you can intelligently deploy information from cases and smartly reference the name of the cases, but it does take a lot of skill and recognition of when it is appropriate to do that. You can write a successful exam answer usually without doing that. So it's not something necessarily to worry about as much in the outline or in your exam answer. But that's something to consider later. But your outline needs to start with the case name. You can also include the citation. That'll help you also remember some identifying information about the case. What court was it in? What year was the case decided? Was it an appellate or trial court case? You can you can see that could just help ground you and have a little bit more information for when you're answering information about the case in class, but isn't necessarily the most important thing necessarily for your exam outline and usually not for preparing for class, but you may as well put it in there. The next thing you want to know: who are the parties to the case? Who is the plaintiff? Who is the defendant? Who is appealing the case? Is it the plaintiff or the defendant? What happened in the trial court at the first level? Was the case dismissed at the motion to dismiss stage? Uh, was it dismissed at the summary judgment stage, or did a party win at the summary judgment stage? Did the case go to a trial and did someone win there? What exactly is being appealed? And who is each party on appeal? Are they a petitioner or are they a respondent? And what was their role in the trial court below? You need that information to ground you. You may want to go ahead and put a party's section at the top, especially if you're having trouble reading cases and following cases. That will help orient you in a productive way to the extent that the information is apparent from the court decision that you are reading. The next thing that you'll want to have are the facts. Draft a really concise statement of what the relevant facts were leading to the legal issue. You don't need all the facts, and it can be hard to know what facts to include. But be concise, get to the point. You don't need to rewrite the entire facts section of the case. Instead, you're going to try to have some bullet points identifying the brass tax. You might also note the procedural history of the case. Again, that can be really important for an advanced understanding of how the case fits into the law. It's something that your professor might ask you about. So if the procedural history is noted, like I mentioned before when I was talking about the parties, note this is an appeal of a motion to dismiss being decided by an appellate court, or this is an appeal of a summary judgment decision. This is an appeal of a post-trial motion, asking a trial judge to throw out a verdict. This is appeal of a motion to remit it, or asking a trial court to adjust the damages that were awarded in a case. Whatever it is. If the case talks about it, note it, and that will help you understand exactly what the trial court or appellate court was being asked to decide in writing the opinion. In some cases, the trial court is going to be writing a decision after a trial and saying, these are the facts, and these are the facts that I find to be true, and this is how I analyze them and apply the law, and this is who I think wins the case. Sometimes the court will be assessing a summary judgment motion. And the court will be saying, okay, I am considering the facts in a light most favorable to the plaintiff because the defendant has moved for summary judgment. And in doing so, I don't think the plaintiff can win as a matter of law. I think if the plaintiff proves all these facts that I see in the record and depositions and discovery, the plaintiff still isn't going to be able to make a case. Well, that's a legally significant conclusion and tells you that all those facts in the case create a legal rule that if they're all added up, they still don't make a cognizable legal claim as a matter of law. That's impactful. It means that if other parties come forward and present those kind of facts, they aren't going to be able to make a case. If they present different facts, maybe they will. So the procedural history can be important. And I'm doing other podcast episodes on how the procedural history can be important to both understanding the cases that you are reading and also to preparing for your exam and preparing for class. The next thing and a key thing that you're going to write down in your case brief is the legal issue. What is the issue in the case? What is the legal question that the court was deciding? And again, whatever the procedural posture of the case feeds into the legal issue as well. So if it's a motion to dismiss, the legal issue is whether the plaintiff stated facts that are adequate to prove a recognized claim if those facts are proven true. If it's a summary judgment motion, often, the issue is whether the plaintiff has presented adequate facts from the record that, if proven true, could create a triable dispute, a genuine issue of material fact. If the procedural posture is that the court just heard a trial, then the court's simply writing down what it believes the facts to be after hearing the witnesses and looking at the evidence. And then the court is simply applying the law to those facts that were proven and noting what was proven and what wasn't. If it's a post-trial motion, the court is assessing whether to adjust a decision that it made or a decision that a jury made in deciding what the facts were and how they applied to the law. So there are a bunch of different types of issues that could come up. And you'll also want to, of course, recognize how the issue fits into the context of your class. So it's not just a procedural question, but it's a substantive one. For example, in a contracts class, one of the first things you're going to learn is that the elements of an enforceable contract are offer, acceptance, consideration. You're going to know those three words like the back of your hand. And early on, you're going to read cases where the issue is whether one party made a contractual offer to another. And you're going to learn a bunch of legal rules about what constitutes a contractual offer and what just doesn't as a matter of law. And you're going to learn what kind of statements might be made by someone that just don't rise to the level of an enforceable promise. So if a party comes to court and says, hey, I think this defendant made this statement and I think it's an enforceable contract. At the motion and dismiss stage, a court might look at those allegations and say, no, sorry, those allegations don't add up to a contract as a matter of law. So your case is going to be dismissed. Or the court might say, Yeah, if you prove that, you you potentially are proving that a contract existed between you, that an offer was made. So we are going to let your case go forward. So those are the issues that can come up. Your job is to write down the issue statement. What was the legal question that the court needed to decide? So in that instance, the most basic formulation of what the issue is is was an offer made. You can add more facts by saying was an offer made by the party name? When? And then insert the facts. What happened? Start to learn how to work the facts into your analysis of these cases. But know how to just make the simple issue statement too, because that's going to be important. You can work in the facts and you can work in the procedural history if it's given in the case. So to put the procedural history and the facts together in the example I just gave, your issue statement could be, for example, if a case was just filed and the court is assessing a motion to dismiss, the issue statement might be Did this plaintiff, the party name, allege facts that if proven would establish a contractual offer where the allegations in their lawsuit claimed, and then what the allegations are about a lawsuit being filed and what they said in their lawsuit that they filed. So that's sort of an advanced way to think about issue statements. I don't want to overcomplicate it for this. I'll do other podcast episodes about that, about the simplest ways to think about issue statements, about more complicated ways to think about them. My advice to you in case briefing, especially in the beginning, is start simple. Just focus on what the legal issue is that you're learning about. If you're having trouble with that, look at the table of contents. What part of the book are you in? That's probably going to tell you what the legal issues are in the cases that you are reading. The next thing you're going to want to write down, of course, is the rule. What are the legal rules being applied in that case? Sometimes the rules are one sentence, sometimes they are longer, and they're going to be a couple paragraphs. It's going to be your job to figure out what rules are important and applicable, put them in your brief, and then figure out which ones go in your case outline so that you can pluck them out from there and use them on your exam when you see issues come up on which those rules could be implicated. Be as concise as you can, as usual, in drafting what those legal principles are. Finally, you're going to write down the court's holding. Why did the court reach the decision that it did, or what decision did the court reach first? The holding is the decision that the court reached. So, if the court is analyzing a motion to dismiss in a case about whether there was a contractual offer, the court is going to be deciding whether the plaintiff alleged adequate facts that if proven would decide that that if proven would show that a contractual offer was made. So the court's holding might be go one way or the other. The court might hold that the plaintiff did allege adequate facts that if proven could establish a contractual offer, or the court could hold that the plaintiff did not allege adequate facts that if proven would establish a contractual offer. So if the latter is the court's holding, then the court will dismiss the case. But if the court does find that there were adequate facts alleged, then the court will not dismiss the case. So the court's holding is going to be kind of tied to the procedural posture. Ultimately, the holding is going to grant a motion or deny it. That's going to be the decision that the court makes, one way or the other. You should also include some information about the reasoning. Why is it that the court reached that decision? What facts were important to the court that caused the court to say, this is how I am deciding this case. This is why I am reaching that holding. The case book may also present concurrences and dissents. You should also note what those were, because those can have important information for you in understanding how these legal rules could be applied across cases and how judges could see and apply those rules differently. Finally, you might add at the bottom of your brief, why does this case matter? What is the significance of this case? And even start thinking about how is the professor going to use this case on the exam? What kind of facts should I look out for in order to trigger my memory of this case and say, aha, some of the legal rules from that case are implicated. I need to pull those out and I need to use them. You may notice that the core elements of the case brief that I'm going over in large part mirror the IRAC format that is used to write exam answers. You're going to be pulling the information that is used for IRAC from these cases. So you're going to be pulling the issue, you're going to be pulling the rule, you're going to be pulling the reasoning or the application, and you're going to be pulling the conclusion. IRAC is a format that you could use for case briefing, but you probably want to get more information and more details, like I just went over. How much time should you spend briefing? It really depends on the length of the case and how complicated it is. But you do want to practice good time management in law school. Try to focus when you're reading. Put your phone out of reach. Put electronics out of reach. Go to a place where you are going to be totally focused on what you are doing. Don't be distracted. When you're working, you're working. When you're taking a break, you're taking a break. Engaging in time management will help you brief faster. Avoid over briefing. Don't spend too much time on it because you are regurgitating everything in the case book. If you're doing that, you're not building the funnel in the way that we want to. Be selective as you brief. You only need to include the relevant facts and legal points. You should use your own words. Don't necessarily copy verbatim from the case book, but use grammar that makes sense to you to the extent that yours is going to sound exactly like what's written in the case. That's fine. You shouldn't necessarily change the language of the case just for the sake of it, but make sure that you write in a way that you understand what it is that you are reading. As you are reading, also try to think about how is this case similar or different from other ones that I am reading? What legal rules does this one add? Is this one applying a rule that I've already learned, but it's telling me a nuance to it? It's telling me maybe a subrule that I might use, an additional nuance to that rule. Is the case developing the rule further? So in some classes, there are going to be rules that have changed quite a bit over time. One example is personal jurisdiction and civil procedure. In your civil procedure class, the first thing you'll probably learn about is personal jurisdiction. And you will find very frustratingly that the doctrine of personal jurisdiction tends to adjust just a little bit every time the Supreme Court issues a decision, it seems, that gets published in a case book. The rules for personal jurisdiction after the 14th Amendment was passed, the original court decisions will seem a little bit different from the ones that come later, for example, like in the Calder case. So you're going to learn a bunch of different rules and how they modify each other and how they evolve over time. And you should note that so that you have a better idea of which rules are the right one to deploy on your exam. Some of those earlier ones may be foundational and important to know so that you can understand the later ones and where they came from and how courts got there. However, you on your exam answer may not use those earlier rules or case briefs at all. They may not make it into your outline at all. You don't need every case in your outline. Remember, it's a funnel when you turn your case briefs into an outline. So try to figure out how the case figure fits into the bigger picture. Also, you can change your approach to outline. Briefing and learning to read these cases, learning to take notes on them. It is a learning process. You are going to refine your style over time. You should welcome that. You should learn and you should get better. You may also eventually stop book briefing. I encourage briefing every case. I encourage you making that your goal is to make some kind of brief, some kind of notes for every case. But the fact of the matter is that you may struggle to do that. You may struggle to read and brief fast enough to get that done before class. Again, I encourage it. I think that's the perfect scenario, but don't let perfect get in the way of progress. If you can't brief every single case, then don't. Maybe note what cases you didn't brief and just underline the rules so you can go back and put them into your outline. But do your best to brief every case because once class is over and you start working on your outline, it's going to make it much easier to determine what legal rules are important to put in that outline, what issues they fit under, and to start thinking, how am I going to write my exam answer in this outline so it's easy to deploy and essentially copy into my exam answer when I walk into that room. Also, as you go further into law school, you may not brief as much or as often. You may get better at reading cases. It may be easier for you to extract the rule. Maybe you get so good at it, you can build an outline as you read. And maybe you get so familiar with how the process of reading cases works that you're prepared to answer questions about cases just based on some notes that you take in the margins and some things that you highlight in your case book. So you don't necessarily need to plan to brief for all three years of law school. Also, of course, some classes may test you differently, especially as you get further into law school. They may not have an issue spot or exam. So you're going to change your approach for those. All right. So this was a really, really succinct discussion about the process of briefing cases in law school and the basics that you should know as you start to prepare your case briefs. Overall, remember that briefing is important. Briefing is building a foundation to help you understand the cases better and understand the rules so that you will have an easier time preparing an exam outline, which is what is going to help you get a better exam score. So indirectly, briefing is helping you get a better exam score, but it is indirect because you need to use the briefs to build your outline. If you have a brief that's a half page long or three-quarters of a page long, I don't think they should get much longer than that in almost any circumstance. It isn't something that you can easily walk into an exam with and translate into an exam answer. Taking that three-quarters of a page and on the fly, translating that into an exam answer, that's going to take mental gymnastics. That's going to take a ton of mental energy. That's going to take a ton of creativity and writing skill. You want to make the process of succeeding easier for you by preparing an impeccable outline. The outline more directly helps you succeed on the exam in comparison to your case briefs. But again, I emphasize the importance of those case briefs because I think they are foundational to preparing an impeccable outline. So think about how you can use your case briefs to succeed in the most important thing academically, which is that issue spotter exam at the end of the semester. They can help you do that and they can help you rise and perform as best as you are capable of performing in your law school career. So thanks everybody for joining. I hope this was a good introduction to what it means to case brief. We'll see you next time.