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hi my name is Caroline Athena and I am a former law lecturer here in London I suppose the founder of a platform called first caste LP calm which helps law students to get at first in both their exams and the rest days today I'm going to talk to you about how to write a first class case notes summary there are three main reasons why you would want to write a case note the first one is when you're writing your coursework and you know for example that you have 10 or 15 cases that you need to include in your coursework for that reason to make your work easier you would um before writing the essay before beginning writing prose let's go ahead and write up a summary a case note summary for each of them and this summary might be a little bit more lengthy in than in other cases so it might be let's say something like 3 4 or even 500 words or it's a half a page in a Word document another reason why we would want to write uppercase note summary is when you are revising for your exams and in those cases case notes summaries are a lot more targeted so they are much shorter you're either including a point of law in the case or you're including the facts of the case or sometimes perhaps even an important judgment and the case the last reason why you would want to write a case notes summary is for when you are asked to do it as part of an assignment now this type of an assignment might be anywhere between 500 up to even thousand two thousand five hundred words long so it can turn into a proper big essay is actively about a specific case but regardless of whichever one you're looking at whichever of those cases you're looking to to write up as a case summary and the tips that I'm gonna share with you will help you with each of them so let's start with the first thing how do you approach writing in case in summary well first of all you find out what cases you need to include in your case and notes summaries and when it comes to exams when you're trying to let's say looking you're looking specific topic and you're trying to figure out okay so which case note when which case is do I need to provide prepare case notes for typically the educators which are mentioned by the lecture in the lecture slides and not anything else that was mentioned let's say in a textbook or a revision guidebook so if your lecturer has mentioned let's say 20 cases in in a specific lecture slides first particular topic then you can let's say take around between 6 8 or 10 cases something like this and prepare case notes summaries for them if you're looking for cases for a course work then you would start with those cases mentioned in the lecture slides and then you would expand by looking at what other cases I mentioned especially in your textbook you hardly ever actually need to go ahead and look for cases on platforms like Westlaw and Lexi's Nexis unless it's an area of law which is very very new and there were not many cases that were discussed in your textbook so perhaps you want to then go ahead and look at Western Nexus Nexus to see if you can find some some new cases that you can mention in your coursework the first thing you would do once you find your cases is you would grab a revision guide or a basic textbook so what I mean by this is those small textbooks that really just contain the basic most important explanations of cases definitions in the statute sections and you would try to find by looking at the content of the table of cases to see whether this specific case is mentioned in that guide and also check whether it is something that so to check which page this case is on and see what's mentioned in that specific guide about the case now in terms of what those types of guides might mention about the case they were mentioned either the facts of the case and the decision in the case or they were mentioned the point of law the point of law in a case is just a rule that was established in a particular case it's usually one sentence and it's usually if something that you can take from this specific case and apply to a variety of other cases even if the circumstances of those cases are very very different now the second thing so the facts in the decision of the case are usually used you can usually use only in the very similar context so let's say if you're looking at the problems now you're doing an exam and it mentions specific circumstances if you want to describe the facts and decision in a particular case then they have to be more or less similar and if they are not at least you have to mention how the circumstances in this scenario can be different or are different from the case so that you can assess the extent to which the court would be likely to make a similar decision in in case of your problem scenario so you know what are the two key things that you should use and include in your case case notes so they are the point of law and the facts and decision in the case now it often happens that a revision guide doesn't include both of those so what you would do then is you would try to find them in a textbook if you can you will look for what's included in the textbook about the specific case if let's say you have a point of law but you're missing the facts go through one two or three different textbooks and try to see if you can find those facts and decision in the textbook if this is not available then you should that's the stage at which you will have to go to West Lowell LexisNexis try to find the report the case and then try to briefly read it just to figure out what were the facts of the case and what was the decision in the case once you have both the facts of the case and decision as well as the point of law all you have to do is literally just formulate it into a and usually a case note will include their full name of the case and the citation of the case of the number that usually follows the to the names of the book both parties in the case and then you could say something like point of law and then mentioned the one sentence that the one rule established in the case you could then say and then you could explain briefly what were the facts in the case and then the final one is the decision and again in one sentence sometimes two short sentences you can mention those of course if you're asked to write an entire assignment about those specific a particular case or if you're asked to if you know that you have to this is one of the key cases for your essay that you're writing and you know you will have to talk a lot about it and another thing you can do is you can try to figure out some key the most important judgments from the case note and from the case and the way that you would do that is again you could get and one of those textbooks which says materials and cases or materials or key cases on them they are usually quite thick textbooks and you would again try to go through the table of cases and find out whether the case is in the textbook and then once you are able to find a case usually those extracts from the judgments are quite lengthy but if you're writing an essay you wouldn't want to include a quote with the judgement that it's longer than about two short sentences so take that into account and just figure out which parts of that specific extract are the most important parts that you can use in your case note one thing that I want to mention to you is I have included a much more expanded version of how to deal with cases and how to approach cases how to create case summaries in my course called first class for exam revision course so that's one thing you can definitely check out and I am also the author of several revision notes guidebooks on different subjects so these are the guide books that include a lot of important information that he can just sort of grab and start revising for for the exam without doing a lot of extra work in terms of creating your own notes so I'll provide a link to both of those down below so make sure you check both of them out if you want more support with both your essays and your exams