Briefing cases is the core skill of law school: compressing a forty-page judgment into something you can hold in your head under exam pressure, and can rely on two years later without re-reading it.
Most students learn it by imitation and never get told the underlying discipline. Here is a method, a worked example on a real Supreme Court judgment, and an honest note about where AI fits.
The structure that works
- Citation and court. Full case name, neutral citation, court, year, and the judges. Precision here is a graded habit and it costs nothing.
- Material facts. Only the facts the outcome turned on — usually five lines, not fifty. The test: could you remove this fact and leave the reasoning intact? Then it is not material.
- Procedural posture. How the case reached this court, who won below, and what is actually being appealed. Students skip this and then cannot explain what “the appeal was dismissed” means for the parties.
- Issues. The questions the court actually answered, written as questions.
- Holding. The answer to each issue, in a sentence.
- Ratio decidendi. The legal principle necessary to the decision — the part that binds later courts. Distinguish it ruthlessly from obiter.
- Reasoning. The steps, the authorities relied on, and any concurrence or dissent worth quoting.
A worked example
Take Marks and Spencer plc v BNP Paribas Securities Services Trust Company (Jersey) Ltd [2015] UKSC 72. A brief of it looks like this.
Court and panel. UK Supreme Court, on appeal from [2014] EWCA Civ 603. Lord Neuberger gave the leading judgment, with Lord Sumption and Lord Hodge agreeing; Lord Carnwath and Lord Clarke added judgments.
Material facts. A commercial lease ran to 2 February 2018 with a tenant’s break right exercisable on 24 January 2012. Rent was payable in advance on the usual quarter days. On 25 December 2011 the tenant paid the full quarter’s Basic Rent — £309,172.25 plus VAT — covering a period ending 24 March 2012. It then broke the lease on 24 January and sought repayment of the portion covering the remainder of the quarter.
Procedural posture. Morgan J held the tenant was entitled to repayment ([2013] EWHC 1279 (Ch)). The Court of Appeal, for reasons given by Arden LJ with whom Jackson and Fulford LJJ agreed, allowed the landlords’ appeal ([2014] EWCA Civ 603). The tenant appealed to the Supreme Court.
Issue. Should a term be implied into the lease requiring the landlords to repay rent referable to the period after the break date?
Holding. No. “I would dismiss this appeal.”
Ratio. A term is implied only where necessary — for business efficacy, or because it is so obvious it goes without saying. Lord Neuberger’s formulation is the sentence to memorise: “a term should not be implied into a detailed commercial contract merely because it appears fair or merely because one considers that the parties would have agreed it if it had been suggested to them. Those are necessary but not sufficient grounds for including a term.”
Reasoning worth keeping. The court traced the test through Shirlaw v Southern Foundries, where MacKinnon LJ described an implied term as “something so obvious that it goes without saying”, and made clear that the officious-bystander enquiry is directed not at the actual parties but at “notional reasonable people in the position of the parties at the time at which they were contracting”. There is also a separate statutory strand: the Apportionment Act 1870 did not assist, because section 2 does not apply to rent paid in advance.
Notice how much of that brief is structural rather than interpretive. Names, citations, dates, figures, who won below — a careful reader can extract all of it in one pass. The ratio is the only part that required judgment.
Telling ratio from obiter: a second worked example
The distinction is easier to state than to apply, so it helps to see it drawn on a single judgment.
In Tillman v Egon Zehnder Ltd [2019] UKSC 32 an employee’s non-competition covenant prevented her from being “engaged or concerned or interested in” a competing business. The words “or interested” would have caught even a minority shareholding, which made the covenant an unreasonable restraint of trade. The question was whether those words could be severed and the rest enforced.
What is ratio. The court held that they could, and disposed of the case accordingly: it “set aside the Court of Appeal’s order and should overrule the decision in the Attwood case”, and “formally restore[d] the injunction granted by Mann J, subject only to the removal of the words ‘or interested'”. The severance principle applied there, and the overruling of the earlier authority, were necessary to that outcome. They bind.
What is not. Lord Wilson closed by adopting a deputy judge’s description of the unreasonable parts of post-employment restrictions as “legal litter” which casts “an unfair burden on others to clear them up”, and added that although the company should win, “there might be a sting in the tail” on costs. That is a pointed observation about drafting practice and about how costs might be approached. Nothing turned on it. It is powerful, quotable and persuasive — and it is not binding.
Now notice why this matters beyond the exam. A brief that records only “severance permitted, appeal allowed in part” loses the sting-in-the-tail remark entirely. A brief that records the remark as though it were the holding will get you into trouble in front of a judge. The discipline is to capture both and to label which is which — and the label is the bit no summary tool can safely do for you.
The mistakes that cost marks
Copying the headnote. Headnotes are written by editors and summarise the decision, not the reasoning. A brief built from one reproduces someone else’s compression, and it shows.
Confusing the outcome with the ratio. “Appeal dismissed” is a result. The ratio in Marks and Spencer is a proposition about when terms may be implied, and it would be the same proposition had the appeal succeeded on different facts.
Recording facts that did not matter. If your facts section runs to a page, you have not decided what the case is about.
Ignoring dissents. Today’s dissent is sometimes tomorrow’s majority, and a dissent almost always states the opposing argument better than a textbook will.
Omitting paragraph numbers. A brief without pinpoints is a brief you cannot check, and one you will have to re-read the judgment to use in an essay. Record the paragraph against every quotation and every proposition as you go; it costs seconds then and saves an afternoon later.
Briefing everything at the same depth. Some cases you need to know cold; most you need to recognise. Matching effort to importance is a skill in itself, and nobody teaches it.
Where AI genuinely helps
Look again at that worked brief and split it in two.
The first part — citation, panel, posture, dates, figures, which court held what — is extraction. It is tedious, it is where transcription errors creep in, and it is exactly what a machine does reliably. Getting “[2013] EWHC 1279 (Ch)” and “£309,172.25” right is a matter of care, not insight.
The second part — what was necessary to the decision — is analysis, and it is the part being examined.
Used well, an AI brief is a first pass at the extraction: it pulls the parties, the posture, the holdings and the paragraph references out of a long judgment in minutes, so your reading time goes into the reasoning. Our engine briefs full judgments with paragraph pinpoints and flags every authority it mentions for verification against the report itself. That flagging is not decoration — AI-fabricated authorities are a real and recurring problem in legal filings.
Where it should not replace you
Do not outsource the ratio. Identifying which proposition was necessary to the decision is the skill being examined, and the skill you will later be paid for.
Use the extracted structure as scaffolding, then read the key paragraphs yourself and write the ratio in your own words, without looking at the summary. If you cannot, you have not understood the case yet — which is precisely the feedback you need, and precisely the feedback a good summary hides from you by being fluent.
One practical habit worth adopting: whatever produced your brief, check the citations against the judgment before you rely on them. Neutral citations, paragraph numbers and the identity of the judge who said a thing are all easy to get subtly wrong and expensive to get wrong in a footnote.
Statutes are the other half of the same skill, and they reward a different reading method — one that starts at the back of the Act rather than the front.
Check your document before you sign it. Legal Case Analyst reads contracts, leases, judgments and legislation under the law of your specific jurisdiction and returns severity-ranked issues with verifiable citations — on screen in minutes, with Word and PDF to download. £12 for the first 100 reports, standard price £24.
This article is general information, not legal advice. No solicitor/attorney–client relationship is created by reading it. For advice on your situation, consult a licensed practitioner in your jurisdiction.
