To Brief or Not to Brief

One of the biggest questions facing 1L's is the question of whether or not to brief the cases we are assigned to read. Most professors will tell their students that briefing is absolutely necessary to a successful 1L year. But is that really the case? Here's what I think...The most important aspect of obtaining a legal education is reading and understanding the cases. One should brief to the extent that briefing will serve this goal. I've been seeing a lot of folks with these massive briefs: procedural posture, names of litigants, exquisitely detailed facts etc. Now if this type of brief helps you to understand the case, then by all means go forward. Be warned however that come finals time these huge briefs may not be all that helpful. One of the major challenges of law school is the amount of information we have to digest.

In order to best digest all of this information, it helps to have cases broken down into bite-sized nuggets. If your briefs are not bite-sized they won't help you.I never briefed. Well that's not entirely true. I briefed in class. This I found to be the best solution for my learning style. I would carefully read each case the night before class. Then I would go over each case again before class to ensure that I would be able to intelligently present in the event that I was called on. Then, in class as the professor went over the case I would brief the case into a bite-sized chunk that would help me remember the key points later.

This method established three things for me. 1. I enjoyed reading the cases as I wasn't worried about rushing through them to finish my briefs. 2. It forced me to understand the cases instead of summarizing them. 3. It made me focus in class on the cases instead of facebook. The end result was a set of class notes far superior to any outline and set of briefs that were actually useful in finals preparation.