# A law school outline — from case briefs to the outline you take into the exam

Recipe No. 9, Study and exams. From The know.sh Cookbook: https://know.sh/cookbook/law-outline

- For: a first-year law student in Contracts
- You bring: your casebook, the syllabus, your class notes, and the briefs you write before each class
- You get: a Contracts outline in six topics, each topic a document whose overview is the outline and whose findings are the case briefs behind it, with an index of the case names that recur
- Time: twenty minutes per brief during term, then a weekend per topic to grow the outline from the briefs
- Keep it: private while you work; share one document by a read-only link

In the first weeks of law school you brief every case: facts, issue, rule, holding, reasoning. By November you have sixty briefs in a folder and an exam that will not ask about any of them by name. It will give you a fact pattern and expect you to know the rules, their elements and their exceptions, and to reach for the right case when two rules pull in different directions. That is what an outline is for, and most students start it too late.

This recipe lets your AI assistant do the filing, so the outline grows as the term goes. You keep briefing cases yourself. Your assistant, whichever one you use, turns the folder of briefs into a shelf: a document per topic, a numbered finding per brief, the opinion linked as a source. You fix it up in the editor, and each document's overview grows into the outline for that topic: rules in your own words, each pointing to the brief that shows it. The index at the back gathers the case names that recur; Look up finds the doctrines.

The reading, the class discussion and the judgement about what a case stands for stay yours. The assistant files, cross-checks and quizzes; it does not write your outline, and it can invent a case that does not exist.

## What you will use

- **Your AI assistant**: Claude, ChatGPT or a local model, connected to know.sh: it files your briefs by topic, links the outline to them, checks one against the other, and writes quizzes.
- **The editor**: Where you check each brief against your notes, drag them into syllabus order, mark **Key** and write the rule statements yourself.
- **Research document**: One document per topic on the syllabus; its overview becomes the outline for that topic.
- **Finding**: One finding per case brief, filed as *Evidence*, with the opinion as a source link; class hypotheticals you have not resolved filed as *Question*.
- **Links between documents**: Links from each rule in the outline to the brief that illustrates it, so a hover shows the facts without leaving the outline.
- **The A–Z index**: The index of the case names that recur in brief titles and first lines; Look up (⌘K) for the doctrines.
- **Quiz**: Quizzes on the rule statements, not the case facts, that come back on the Revisit rule.
- **Public link**: A read-only link to a topic for your study group, with a password and an expiry after exams.

## Method

### 1. Keep briefing the cases yourself

Briefing is how you learn to read a case, and you need the brief in front of you when you are called on in class. Keep writing them before each class, wherever you write now: a word processor, a notes app, a folder of text files. Give every brief the same headings: *Facts*, *Procedural history*, *Issue*, *Rule*, *Holding*, *Reasoning*, and one of your own, *Why it is in the casebook*.

Put the full citation on the first line. Write in your own words; the casebook's notes and questions belong to its authors, and a brief you copied teaches you nothing.

### 2. Let your assistant file the briefs by topic

Every few weeks, give your assistant the briefs and the syllabus: attach the files in Claude or ChatGPT, or point a local client at the folder. Ask it to make a shelf called *Contracts — fall 2026* in know.sh, a document per syllabus topic (*Formation: offer and acceptance*, *Consideration and its substitutes*, *Defences*, *Interpretation and the parol evidence rule*, *Performance and breach*, *Remedies*) and a finding per brief in the right topic.

Tell it how: title each finding with the case name and the idea it stands for, "Lucy v. Zehmer — the objective theory of assent", because the index learns case names from finding titles and first lines; file each as *Evidence*; keep your headings and your wording; add a link to the opinion as a source. Forty briefs become forty findings in one sitting.

### 3. Fix it up in the editor

Open each topic and press **Edit**. Check every brief against your own file: the assistant should have moved your words, not improved them, and a brief filed under the wrong topic goes to the right one. Drag the findings into the order the syllabus teaches them, and mark the cases the professor lingers on as **Key**.

After class, add what the professor did with the case. Select the passage and leave a **Note** with the hypothetical — "What if Zehmer had been genuinely drunk?" — and what the class concluded. A hypothetical with no settled answer becomes a finding of its own, filed as a *Question*, to take to office hours.

### 4. Grow the overview into the outline

At the end of each topic, ask your assistant for a skeleton: "Using know.sh, read the briefs in *Formation: offer and acceptance* on my Contracts shelf and put, in the overview, a heading for each doctrine they illustrate, with the cases that belong under it, linked to their briefs. Do not write rule statements."

Then press **Edit** and write the outline under those headings: the rule in your own words, its elements as a numbered list, the exceptions, and the cases that show it. That writing is the studying. The links show a preview on hover, so while you revise the rule you can check the facts without leaving the page.

### 5. Check the outline against the briefs

An outline drifts. A rule you wrote in October gets reworded in December until it no longer says what the case held. Ask your assistant to read a topic's overview against its briefs and list every rule that a brief does not support, every case in the outline with no brief behind it, and every citation that differs between the two. It can leave a proposed note on each, with **Accept** and **Dismiss**.

Treat that list as leads and check each one yourself. When a rewrite goes wrong, open **Revisions** on the document: every version is there, marked as made by you or by an assistant, with **Restore**.

### 6. Quiz yourself on rules, not on facts

Ask your assistant for a quiz on a topic: "Using know.sh, make a quiz of eight questions on the rule statements in *Remedies* on my Contracts shelf: elements, exceptions and which case illustrates each. No questions about case facts." It writes the questions with know.sh's quiz tools, each citing the brief it came from, and you take the quiz in know.sh or the iOS app.

Without that instruction, quizzes drift towards case trivia ("What did Zehmer write the contract on?"), which the exam will not ask. The quiz comes back under *Revisit* after 3, 7 or 21 days, depending on your score.

### 7. Share a topic with your study group

If your study group divides the outline, press **Share** on your topic to make a read-only link. Set a password and an expiry date after the exam, and copy the link when it appears; it is shown only once. Readers see the outline and the briefs, not your notes or highlights. Leave out any finding you would rather keep to yourself from its own page.

The group cannot comment on the link. Their corrections reach you in the group chat or in person, and you file them. Check your school's honour code first: some professors forbid shared outlines for their exams.

## Prompts to try

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

> Using know.sh, read the briefs in the document “Consideration and its substitutes” on my “Contracts — fall 2026” shelf and add a finding called “Outline skeleton”: the doctrines they illustrate as headings, and under each, the cases that belong there with their finding numbers. Do not write the rule statements; I will write those myself.

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

> Using know.sh, compare the overview of the document “Formation: offer and acceptance” on my Contracts shelf with its briefs. List every rule in the overview that no brief supports, every case named in the overview that has no brief, and every citation that differs between the overview and the brief. Quote the lines. Do not change anything.

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

> Using know.sh, make a quiz of eight questions on the Remedies document in my Contracts shelf. Test the rule statements in the overview (expectation, reliance and restitution; foreseeability; mitigation), not the facts of the cases, and cite the brief (finding) that illustrates each rule.

## Variations

- For the bar exam, make a shelf per subject and a finding per rule statement rather than per case; the briefs from law school become the sources those rules cite.
- Keep a document called *Exam technique* with the professor’s past comments on what good answers do, filed as *Suggestion* findings, and reread it the night before.
- In a seminar, use the same shape for a paper’s research: a finding per source, and an overview that becomes your argument’s skeleton. The [literature review](/cookbook/literature-review) recipe does this at length.

## Where it falls short

- There is no print or PDF. If your professor allows a printed outline in an open-book exam, copy the overview into a word processor when it is finished and print from there.
- Any assistant can invent a case, a citation or a holding, and one with web search searches the open web, not Westlaw or Lexis. Nothing it finds goes into the outline until you have read the opinion.
- The assistant only files what you give it. Connecting it means signing in once, following the support page, and a smaller local model may misfile briefs, so read what it wrote; Revisions shows every change.
- Study group members read; they do not write. There is no shared editing, so a jointly written outline means each person keeps their own topics and shares a link to each.

## A note on honour codes, citations and legal advice

Check your law school's honour code and your professor's rules before you use AI in your studies or share an outline. Some professors forbid outlines from other students, some forbid AI tools for any graded work, and exam software usually locks you out of everything else during the exam. Disclose AI use where your school asks you to.

Read and verify every case, citation and quotation yourself, in the reporter or a database your school provides. Language models, including the one you connect, have produced cases that do not exist, and lawyers have been sanctioned for filing them. Build the outline from your own briefs, your casebook and your class notes; never from recalled exam questions. Opinions themselves are public, but your casebook's edits, notes and questions are not, so summarise rather than paste them.

This is study material, not legal advice, and it should never be given to anyone as if it were.

Indexed under: Case briefs, Law school outlines, Contracts, Objective theory, Honour codes, Citation checking.