Top Law Schools

Hello,

I just received my list of required textbooks for the coming semester (1L). I've found a 'Casenote Legal Brief' keyed to my particular casebook. Question for older students: Are Lexis Nexis' canned briefs just as useful as this series? Can I rely entirely on their briefs for all my classes, or should I purchase this particular casenote and seek out others for my remaining casebooks?

I don't intend on substituting actually reading the cases with canned briefs, but I do plan on incorporating their summaries in my outlines. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

weber35 wrote:Hello,

I just received my list of required textbooks for the coming semester (1L). I've found a 'Casenote Legal Brief' keyed to my particular casebook. Question for older students: Are Lexis Nexis' canned briefs just as useful as this series? Can I rely entirely on their briefs for all my classes, or should I purchase this particular casenote and seek out others for my remaining casebooks?

I don't intend on substituting actually reading the cases with canned briefs, but I do plan on incorporating their summaries in my outlines. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

I'd do the ones keyed to your book. Sometime cases have wildly different parts.

DF in property: "This case was about handicap rights in housing ... um I mean it's about leases."

What can you tell me about Lexis Nexis's? I've only found one brief keyed to one of my casebooks. Will LN suffice for my other subjects? Or should I just find a highly-rated substitute? (I don't have access yet, so I cant check it out for myself). I'm really looking for key facts/rule of law. Thanks again.

weber35 wrote:What can you tell me about Lexis Nexis's? I've only found one brief keyed to one of my casebooks. Will LN suffice for my other subjects? Or should I just find a highly-rated substitute? (I don't have access yet, so I cant check it out for myself). I'm really looking for key facts/rule of law. Thanks again.

The lexis ones kinda suck. They sumarize the case as a whole. Most casebook case's are significantly cut down.

Yeah, Lexis and Westlaw briefs aren't even as good as the random student ones you can find by Googling.

I think I looked at briefs once for the book you're referring to (think it was Civ Pro keyed to Friedenthal), and they were pretty good from what I could tell.

A word of advice. Nothing can substitute, for exam prep purposes, the process of going through the cases yourself and making up your own summaries. This is how you figure out what the cases mean, how you remember what they mean. Most cases are too nuanced to just yank their holdings out of a summary and apply them on an exam. The way a case's holding actually gets applied to facts, in practice, is really the thing; a nuanced understanding of that is what distinguishes a great exam from a competent one. So I would only use these summaries if you have real trouble accurately figuring out what a case is saying - in which case you'll need these summaries, or something like them, to survive.

I agree. I don't see any reason why you need Casenotes. There are plenty of free case briefs online. While I think that writing your own case briefs is a waste of time, you can get everything you need from Lexis or West.

I personally loved casenotes, especially for Crim or Property where you often have SO many cases, most of which are relatively meaningless. For me, reading the 1 page brief before reading the case meant I could skim the case quickly. Sometimes I'd draw a different thing out of the case, but having an idea about what was going on before diving into it really helped for me personally.

I dug my Casenotes for my Crim class. It was pretty handy.