Whether it’s a recent law school grad or a retired law firm partner, mention briefing a case to any lawyer and you’re sure to get a strong reaction. Along with outlining and the Socratic method, briefing cases is a law school rite of passage that law students have endured for decades. If you’re currently in law school, you’re all too familiar with the task.
Much to many students’ dismay, there is no electronic tool that will perfectly digest and predictively code their cases for them. Students still have to do much of the legwork themselves. There are, however, resources available to law students that make the process much less painful.
Briefing Cases
If you have just started law school, you may be wondering what the heck briefing a case even means. A month into your first semester, you still might not know.
There’s no point in sugar-coating it: Most cases are mundane and dry, and understanding them can be difficult. Nonetheless, case decisions are the fundamental building blocks of the law, and you’ll spend much of your career reading them. To keep all the facts and reasoning straight, lawyers and future lawyers brief the cases, breaking them down into their key parts:
- Procedural Posture: This is a description of how the case came to be. The main things to know are whether the case had previous proceedings in other courts, what was decided in those proceedings, and how the case ended up in the current court.
- The Parties: Before you can understand any case, you must understand which party is bringing the case, and against whom they’re bringing it. Quite often, there are more parties involved than the two names that appear in a case citation.
- The Issues: What question or questions is the court being asked to answer? The issues are what the court is deciding as a matter of law.
- The Facts: Every case is built around a set of underlying facts that led to the legal issue being alleged. More often than not, the case will include a lot of facts that provide context, but are not necessarily relevant to the legal issue at hand. In briefing a case, it’s important to focus on the facts that are necessary to the court’s decision, and not be distracted by unimportant background information.
- The Holding: This is what the court ultimately decides on the issues presented. Sometimes the holding can be found right at the end of a decision; other times, it’s buried somewhere in the middle. Picking out the holding is the ultimate purpose of briefing the case. Be careful, however, not to confuse the holding with the judgment, which is what the court does procedurally to give effect to the holding.
- The Reasoning: This is where briefing can get really tricky. Decisions are often long and contain a lot of exposition that is not the actual holding of the case. This exposition is also known as dicta, and sorting through it is where Westlaw comes in (see below). While dicta has no legal weight, it can be crucial to understanding the reasoning behind the court’s decision. Without parsing the dicta, it can be impossible to know why the court reached the decision it did.
How Westlaw Helps
Technology is key to helping lawyers and law students alike quickly understand the “why” of legal decisions, without getting lost in page after page of dicta.
Long recognized by attorneys as a leading platform for conducting legal research, Westlaw is now the go-to tool for helping law students efficiently and accurately brief their cases. If preparing case summaries is the bane of your law school existence, Westlaw just might be your new best friend.
Westlaw is specifically designed in a way that mirrors a case brief. Any time you pull up a case on Westlaw, you will see that it has already been broken out into the following categories:
- Synopsis: This is an introduction to who the players are in the case and how they got there. In essence, this is your procedural posture, parties, issues, and facts all rolled into one.
- Holding: Westlaw tells you up front what the holding of the case is, so you don’t have to waste time trying to find it in a lengthy decision. When you know the holding at the outset, you can better understand the dicta (the “why”) that leads to the holding.
- Headnotes: These are summaries of the “why.” Westlaw’s Headnotes highlight the reasons for the decision and parse through the confusing dicta to get at what really matters.
Westlaw Headnotes are written in plain language, so they’re easy for an unseasoned law student to understand. Think of them as a translator from Legalese to English. Reading a case while having Headnotes as a reference will guide you the best understanding of a case and why you might care about it.
Some Headnotes present pure issues of law, while others give you a combination of legal principles mixed with the facts of the case. Why? Attorney use case law for different purposes. Sometimes they’ll rely on a case strictly for its legal holdings. Other times, they’ll like a case because it talks about the law as applied to facts that are similar to their own case. Headnotes give you the best of both worlds, allowing you to determine what the most important aspects of a case are for your specific purposes.
As an added bonus, many cases on Westlaw offer a Brief It function, which pulls out the key information with the simple click of a button. While it’s always still important to read the whole case, this is as close as you will get to technology that will brief your cases for you.
The reality is, today’s law students rely heavily on technology to manage their demanding workloads. While there are lots of expensive options on the market, finding a product that actually works is what really matters.
Thomson Reuters is here to help you navigate the confusing waters of law school by providing technology designed to help law students and lawyers succeed.
With your cases properly briefed and a wealth of information at your fingertips, you’ll no longer have to dread being called on in Civil Procedure. It’s time to make technology work for you so you can focus on your future.
This is the first post in the Introduction to Law School, a series powered by Thomson Reuters.