One major element of your class preparation is writing a brief for the main cases in your required readings. You have probably heard of case briefing, maybe read about it already. In this session, we are going to break down what a case brief is, why it is important for you to do. A case “brief” is a written summary of the case. To prepare one, you have to distill the case’s most important parts and restate them in your own words. 

Case briefing helps prepare you in many ways as a law student and a future attorney. 

First, to describe a case accurately, you must read it carefully and thoroughly. Describing the case in your own words forces you to determine exactly what the court said, which legal principles and facts were essential to its decision, and the proper legal terminology and procedures. You do not understand a case simply because you can copy parts of it from your casebook. On the other hand, if you can describe the case in your own words, you can feel reasonably confident that you understand it. 

Second, after reading so many cases in each course, your case briefs will help you remember the details of each case for class discussions and for exam preparation. Case briefs are a particularly helpful study aid because they cover all the cases you studied in class, whereas most other study aids are not so carefully tailored to your coursework. To be most effective, case briefs must be brief. Otherwise, you will have difficulty discovering the salient points in your brief during class discussions, and you will have far too many pages to read for convenient exam review, because you may brief hundreds of cases each term.

Third, briefing cases exercises skills you will use throughout your legal career. As a lawyer, you will have to read and analyze cases with a careful eye to detail. You also will have to summarize cases when writing legal memoranda, briefs, and other documents and when making oral arguments to courts. Because case briefing is such a valuable skill, the time and effort you spend perfecting it in law school will be repaid many times over. 

Because case briefing can be time-consuming and difficult, especially when you are beginning, you may be tempted to use commercially prepared case briefs. By all means, resist the temptation. The primary benefit of a case brief comes from preparing it. The process of writing a brief forces you to exercise your analytic skills and to dig into all the procedural and substantive aspects of a case. Simply reading a canned brief will not provide this valuable exercise. Additionally, you cannot be sure that the canned brief is accurate or focuses on the same aspects of the case as your professor. Besides, canned briefs are unavailable for most of the cases you will have to read when you are a lawyer! 

As you become more experienced at briefing, you will get faster.Once you have mastered briefing, you can consider omitting a separate written brief and instead brief in the casebook. You can make the necessary notations in the margins of the casebook and can highlight key passages. Keep this possibility in mind when you are deciding whether to buy new or used casebooks, because you will want room for your notations.

The primary significance of preparing a case "brief" is to enable you, the student, to more thoroughly understand the analytical "process" by which that very "rule" was derived. I want to note, while a "brief" may certainly be helpful in studying for the final exam, its true benefit lies in training the student's thought processes as they attempt to understand how to perform "legal analysis" by unraveling and dissecting actual judicial opinions.

1. Select a useful case brief format.

There are many different ways to brief a case. You should use the format that is most useful for your class and exam preparations. Regardless of form, every brief should include the following information in steps 2-9.

 2. Use the right caption when naming the brief.

A brief should begin with the case name, the court that decided it, the year it was decided, and the page on which it appears in the casebook.

 3. Identify the case facts.

Next, state the facts of the case. This section is necessary because legal principles are defined by the situations in which they arise. Include in your brief only those facts that are legally relevant. A fact is legally relevant if it had an impact on the case's outcome. For example, in a personal injury action arising from a car accident, the color of the parties' cars seldom would be relevant to the case's outcome. Similarly, if the plaintiff and defendant presented different versions of the facts, you should describe those differences only if they are relevant to the court's consideration of the case. Because you will not know which facts are legally relevant until you have read and deciphered the entire case, do not try to brief a case while reading it for the first time.

 4. Outline the procedural history.

With the statement of facts, you have taken the case to the point at which the plaintiff filed suit. The next section of the brief, the procedural history, begins at that point and ends with the case's appearance in the court that wrote the opinion you are reading. For a trial court opinion, identify the type of legal action the plaintiff brought. For an appellate court opinion, also describe how the trial court and, if applicable, the lower appellate court decided the case and why.

5. State the issues in question.

You are now ready to describe the opinion you are briefing. In this section of the brief, state the factual and legal questions that the court had to decide. To analyze a case properly, you must break it down to its component parts.

6. State the holding in your words.

In this section, separately answer each question in the issues section. For quick reference, first state the answer in a word or two, such as "yes" or "no." Then in a sentence or two, state the legal principle on which the court relied to reach that answer (the "holding").

7. Describe the court's rationale for each holding.

You now should describe the court's rationale for each holding. This section of the case brief may be the most important, because you must understand the court's reasoning to analyze it and to apply it to other fact situations, such as those on the exam. Starting with the first issue, describe each link in the court's chain of reasoning.

8. Explain the final disposition.

Describe the final disposition of the case. Did the court decide in favor of the plaintiff or the defendant? What remedy, if any, did the court grant? If it is an appellate court opinion, did the court affirm the lower court's decision, reverse it in whole or in part, or remand the case for additional proceedings?

 9. Include other opinions.

Concurring and dissenting opinions are included in a casebook when they present an interesting alternative analysis of the case. Therefore, you should describe the analysis in your case brief. It will help you see the case in a different light.

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