Briefing cases is the first real task law school hands you, and almost nobody explains how to do it. So you highlight everything, you write two pages per case, and you still freeze when the professor says your name. Lewis Law School Success Coaching works with students one-on-one, by phone and video, to build a briefing habit that takes minutes instead of hours and actually holds up under cold call pressure.
What a Usable Brief Actually Looks Like
A brief is not a summary of the case. It is a tool you build for a specific moment — the moment you get called on, and the moment three months later when you are outlining and need to know why this case sits in this chapter. Those two jobs are the whole test. If a line in your brief does not serve one of them, it does not belong there.
Coaching sessions walk through your real assigned reading, not a textbook example. Curtis reads what you read, you brief it, and then the two of you take it apart line by line: what you kept, what you could have cut, and what the professor was going to ask that your brief would not have covered.
- Facts that matter: the two or three that changed the outcome, not the full procedural history
- The issue as a question: phrased narrowly enough that it has one answer
- The holding and the rule: kept separate, because professors ask about them separately
- The court's reasoning: the step that moves from rule to result — this is where cold calls live
- Your own margin note: why this case was assigned after the last one
Law School Is a Skill, Not a Mystery
Most students who struggle are not lazy and are not short on knowledge. They work hard at the wrong things — reading every word twice, briefing for length, memorizing facts that will never appear on an exam. Grades in law school come from method, not from how much you know. Once the method changes, the same effort starts producing very different results.
That is why briefing is the place to start. It is the habit that feeds everything downstream. Briefs written for the cold call and the outline turn into a usable outline; a usable outline turns into IRAC analysis you can write under time pressure. Fix the front of the chain and the rest gets easier on its own.
How the Coaching Works
Sessions are one-on-one with Curtis Lewis — no group classes, no recorded modules, no generic worksheets. You bring your casebook, your syllabus, and whatever you have written so far. Scheduling runs Monday through Sunday, 9:00am to 7:00pmwhich means sessions can land the night before a class you are dreading or the weekend before a midterm.
Briefing coaching usually moves in this order:
- You brief a case the way you normally would, and send it over before the session.
- Curtis marks what is doing work and what is filler, and explains the difference.
- You rebuild the same brief using a tighter structure and time yourself doing it.
- You run a mock cold call on that case out loud, so the brief gets tested the way it will be in class.
- You repeat the process on the next assignment until the short version becomes automatic.
You are not being graded on how much you read. You are being graded on what you can do with it.
Questions Students Ask
Briefing questions rarely come alone — they arrive tangled up with outlining, class participation, and exam anxiety. Bring all of it. The sections below cover what comes up most often, and anything they miss is worth a direct conversation.
Start with a conversation. Tell Curtis what class is giving you trouble, what your briefs look like right now, and when your next exam is. Call (903) 651-6999 or email curtislewis420@gmail.com, and you can be working on this week's reading in your next session.