Every case you read in law school opens with a story. Someone was hurt, someone broke a promise, someone was arrested. The story is not the point. The court's handling of a narrow slice of that story is the point, and learning to tell the two apart is the first real skill of law school.
Why the Facts Are Where Most Briefs Go Wrong
Open a stack of first-semester briefs and the fact sections all look the same: a paragraph that retells the case from the beginning, in order, with names and dates and dollar amounts. It reads like a summary because it is one. The problem is that a summary does nothing for you in March when you are staring at an exam hypothetical.
The facts that belong in your brief are the ones the court leaned on. If the opinion turns on whether the defendant knew the ice was there, then the defendant's knowledge is a legally significant fact. The color of the car, the name of the street, the year the contract was signed — unless the court used them, they are background. Curtis works with students to make that cut cleanly, case after case, until it stops being a judgment call and starts being a habit.
Reading a Case for What the Court Actually Did
Comprehending the facts is not a separate exercise from the rest of the brief. It runs backward from the holding. Once you know what the court decided and why, you can go back through the opinion and ask of every fact: did this change the outcome? Would the result flip if this fact were different? That second question is the one that does the heavy lifting, because it is exactly the question a professor asks when they write a hypothetical.
In sessions, students bring a case they have already read and walk through it out loud. Curtis pushes on the reasoning — where does the rule come from, which sentence is the holding, what did the dissent think the majority got wrong about the record. The coaching is one-on-one, by phone or video, and available Monday-Sunday, 9:00am-7:00pm, so it fits around class and reading time rather than competing with it.
- Separating the procedural history from the underlying dispute
- Identifying which facts the court expressly relied on
- Spotting facts the court quietly ignored, and asking why
- Stating the facts at the right level of generality for the rule
- Carrying those facts forward into a usable IRAC structure
- Condensing a ten-page opinion into a brief you can actually review
How This Skill Shows Up on the Exam
Law school exams hand you a fact pattern and ask what happens. Nothing in that pattern is accidental. Every detail the professor wrote in is either a trigger for a rule, a red herring, or a distinguishing fact that pulls the answer away from the case you studied. Students who spent the semester reading cases for plot do not see those triggers. Students who spent the semester asking which fact mattered and why see them immediately, because they have been doing that exact thing September.
That is the connection this page is really about. Case briefing is not busywork for class discussion. It is exam practice under a different name, and the fact section is where the practice happens.
The court did not decide the story. It decided one question inside the story. Find that question, and the facts sort themselves.
Coaching is personalized to what you are actually reading — your casebook, your professor, your assigned opinions. There is no generic curriculum to work through. If you are stuck on a line of contracts cases, that is what the session covers.
Start With a Conversation
The first step is a straightforward talk about where you are and what is not clicking. Bring a brief you have written and Curtis will read it with you. If you want law school case brief help that goes past formatting and into how the reading actually works, reach Curtis Lewis at (903) 651-6999 or email curtislewis420@gmail.com.