Tag Archives: comparison

Comparison of IRAC briefs, Part 1

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Case briefing was one of the most important skills taught this semester, comprising a major part of the grade and the instruction time in Introduction to Law, Family Law, and Torts. It sounds like it should be a snap–just pick out the most salient features of the case, arrange them in order, and then you’re done. Yes, it sounds very easy…right up until you’re eyeballs deep in a court opinion bristling with references to other cases trying not to get distracted from the thread of the argument and miss the one sentence in seven pages that contains the actual ruling. Still, once you’ve gotten over the initial learning curve with briefs, it gets easier to find those needles in the haystack.

The brief format used in all my classes was called IRAC, for Issues, Ruling, Analysis, and Conclusion. Ruling and Analysis are in the opposite order in the brief as in the court opinion, so they are often the hardest to lay out clearly.

What follows are two briefs I did very early on in the semester. In a second post, I’ll provide two more done at the end of the semester for comparison.

First, a brief from Introduction to Law:

And second, one from Torts:

Comparison between two Last Will and Testaments

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This example was the first assignment for my Computers and the Law course, meant to display the use of Microsoft Word more than familiarity with the provisions and format of estate documents. I utilized online examples to find the best legal terminology I could with my current skills.

 

The second example, from Introduction to the Law about 3 months later, comes in three parts. The assignment was to create a joint will and a living trust agreement, but my research revealed that joint wills are discouraged (though still technically legal) in Colorado. Instead, I executed a pair of mutual wills and prepared the requisite trust agreement. By this point I had gained a much better grasp of the necessary provisions of a proper will and was able to modify the standard language more extensively to suit my needs.

Comparison between 2 Memorandums of Law

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This first example, a memorandum on paralegal ethics and Colorado rules regarding Unauthorized Practice of Law, was one of the first assignments I completed for Introduction to the Law, the ground-level course in the paralegal program. As you can see, while my general writing skills were fairly good I had not yet entirely mastered the preferred format and writing style.

 

The second example is from two months later, and it shows a better understanding of how to present a case brief in memorandum form and also more detailed legal reasoning.

Family Law assignment scenario

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My Family Law course focuses pretty heavily on composing separation, custody, and divorce documents, so the professor handed out a sheet with a hypothetical couple, their children, their assets, and their tribulations and foibles. These formed the basis for several assignments that went from the initial filing and restraining order all the way through to the final divorce decree. I reproduce the scenario document here so that my future assignments based on it will be comprehensible.

And these were my first three documents produced from those assumptions:

The El Paso County Combined Courts have a, shall we say, quirk of using Wingdings characters for checkboxes on their downloadable forms, which makes them very difficult to fill out on the computer. I can’t imagine this encourages people to efile, but maybe they were concerned that creating real checkboxes in MS Word would make people with older versions of the software unable to open the documents.