6 Steps To Write A Flawless Legal Case Study

As a law student, you will need to get through complex case studies and present accurate analysis of those cases. But anyone pursuing a law degree knows that working on such case study analysis is, by no means, simple. However, most of the time, the difficulty arises from the lack of understanding about how to approach the legal case study analysis.

Now, if you’re having the same difficulty in preparing a legal case study, then you need to learn about the steps properly and go through some legal case analysis examples. The steps of preparing legal case studies are elaborated below.

Steps to Prepare A Legal Case Study Analysis

Step 1: Read the case thoroughly

You should carefully go through the case at least once until you can figure out which facts are most vital for the case or begin analysing the court’s holding. It’s hard to accurately determine what was central to the court’s reasoning until you’ve read the case all the way through.

The first time you go through a case, don’t think about figuring it all out at once. Just read to get a sense of what’s happening, who the major parties are, and what they want the court to do.

Step 2: Outline the case’s procedural history

All written court decisions consist of a case that has been through at least one round of appeal. Hence, as a law student, you should be able to identify the path this particular case followed from the initial lawsuit to the court proceedings that ultimately developed the opinion you’re reading.

The procedural history elaborates on the role of the litigants, and thus it imperative to know what each of them is identified as throughout the written opinion. You need to also understand how the case moved through the court system, who sued whom, and who appealed in order to prepare a solid analysis.

Step 3: Identify the relevant facts

At the basis of every legal case, there has to be a story of a dispute between two parties. However, not all of the facts and circumstances associated with this dispute will be significant to the holding of the case. To evaluate the legal case, you must decipher which parts of the story are relevant to the issue highlighted in the court that made the decision.

In many cases, the initial information that prompted the dispute may be summed up in a sentence or two. Often, what’s really essential is what happened afterwards. Just like Samsung SWOT analysis for reference.

Step 4: Present the issue as a yes/no question

The easiest way to decipher a court’s analysis and reasoning of the legal issue is to create a question that relates to the case. You can phrase the question in a manner that can be answered with a straight yes or no.

In many cases, the issue before the court may raise multiple yes/no questions, or a few follow-up questions that are based on the answer to the first. This usually happens when a specific factual situation present in the case has never been explored by any other court. The court must first understand whether a particular law is applicable to that factual situation at all before it can determine how the law applies.

Step 5: Provide the court’s answer to the question

After you’ve rephrased your issue as a question that can be addressed with a yes or no, in many cases, the court’s answer will be one of these words. However, some cases may also involve more nuanced response, like “sometimes” or “maybe.”

Some judges possess a clear, simple writing style, and they’ll phrase the issue as a question and address it directly. However, this isn’t ideally the case. In most written opinions, you will have to determine for the question and answer all by yourself.

Step 6: Emphasis on the facts that the court found most important

Among the relevant facts you’ve already identified related to a specific legal case, some will be more significant than others because they reflect the reason the court decided on one rule over another.

Sometimes the simple way to find the court’s fact/facts is to think about what would have happened if they’d decided to focus on a different fact. Even though many other details may be relevant, or important to the case, those aren’t the information that made the court rule the way it did.

These steps will ensure that your legal case study analysis turns out perfect.