THE LAW SCHOOL BRIEF

I'm just going to go ahead and give you guys the brief template that got me through my 1L + 2L years. Let's go. So as you can see when I open Google Chrome, I go to the top and hit brief and that has my template, which is in it Google Docs. Pretty simple. Um, and I saved it as template so I can always reference it. Let's walk through what's in here though. Of course, put the name of the case at the top and then the location. They will ask you this one L year, where is the court case being held? Is it the U.S. Supreme Court or is it maybe the Supreme Court of Wisconsin? Or is it maybe the Supreme Court of Wisconsin? Where are we at? Then? The date I think also is important cause it lets you know where exactly we are. So I just put the year and from there, any themes of the case? Like maybe it's about Miranda rights, maybe it's about a particular amendment. If you have the theme listed out at the top, it becomes easier to categorize your briefs for studying. On the flip side, when you're in finals, from there, um, I fill out the facts. The facts are pretty straight forward. Um, the facts of the case. Some cases will have a huge storyline, others will have two sentences about the facts. Sometimes there's like literally nothing about the facts because the casebook authors didn't think they were super relevant, um, to what you're supposed to take away. So it really depends on the case, but just put there whatever you have. Um, and then from there, I actually like to skip to the bottom and put basically the decision at the bottom, because that is something that's very easy to find when you're like, skimming over the case. And so the disposition is just reversed or, you know, held. Basically, what did they decide? In a one word or two word answer. So that when the professor asks you, what happened in this case, what did they decide? You have it at a glance. And again, just a quick, easy one word answer. And then I'll say, okay, why? And that's where the holding comes in. You want a one sentence, uh, the court held blank, because blank kind of sentence where it explains, uh, sort of the new concept that the court has decided upon. And then you can go into the reasoning, which just lists out again all their reasoning behind that decision. The procedural history also becomes very important for one L's because they wanna make sure that you guys are actually understanding what happened at the lower courts. So at least in my 1L year, we were kind of hammered about procedural history. So if you're an incoming 1L, just like be prepared for that and try your best to understand and list out here what happened in the procedural history, so you can make sure you're understanding that moving forward. Cause it actually is super important to be able to grasp that on your own. Then rules, of course. Typically this is just one, maybe two rules. Sometimes there's more, but it's very rare. And it's, what are you supposed to be taking away from this case? What new rule do we have? And you'll probably be memorizing that for your final. And then the issue is just what is the heart of this case? What is the legal issue at hand? Typically I start these with a whether, whether this or that, uh, kind of statement. And make sure it's very concise. And again, one sentence for this, because your professor wants you to be really direct on a cold call and not be too wordy. Just give him one sentence. And that's pretty much what's in my template. So let's say that I had five cases I was reading for a class. Here's what I would do. I would go ahead and hit command and then hit the Google Doc button five times. And those five times would then make five new documents for me to go ahead and copy and paste into. There we go. There is my five. And from there I would go ahead and open a new document for each one of those. Have five blank canvases and from there go back to the template. And you want to basically select all one of these days and then copy it and then paste it into all of those new documents, so they all have the template right there for you to fill out. And then from there, you go ahead and plug in the name of each case at the top. I actually do it as the name of the Google Doc so I can find them during finals. And I'm like, wait, what was this case about? You can just look it up by name within your Google Docs. And you'll have all of a cheat sheet version of the case ready in your own words. Your own language. And I make a brief for every case where a professor is a tough cold caller. Um, basically, one out of year, it was for all of my classes. Two out of year, uh, I knew which professors we're going to be hard on us about the case details and pretty much would only do briefs for those classes. Last semester, I literally had only one class that I made briefs for. But I've always made my own because I feel like the work of filling this out really helps prepare you for the test and make sure that you are getting all the most key ingredients out of that case and that you understand what really happened. Let me know what other questions you guys might have about briefs and how they're used. I am an open book and happy to answer anything.