A reading sequence that fills the worksheet
A brief is a record of a decision you have read, in the order that makes the decision usable later. Working through the steps below in sequence tends to produce a brief you can rely on in class and in an exam, because each step constrains the next.
- Court and procedural posture. Identify the deciding court, the level below it, and what was decided there. Posture governs which questions were live: an appeal from a summary determination is not the same animal as an appeal after a full trial.
- Material facts. Keep only the facts the outcome turned on. A fact is material if changing it could plausibly change the result. Everything else is background you can compress to a sentence.
- Issue. State the question the court had to answer, in one sentence, in terms that could be answered yes or no. If you need three sentences, you probably have more than one issue and should number them.
- Rule or test. Record the legal standard the court applied, including its elements or stages if it is a structured test. Note where the standard came from, since a test restated from an earlier authority behaves differently than one announced fresh.
- Holding. Write the court's answer to your stated issue, applied to these facts. If your holding does not answer your issue, one of the two is wrong.
- Reasoning. Trace the steps from the rule to the holding, including the inferences drawn from the facts and the arguments the court rejected.
- Ratio and obiter. Separate the principle necessary to the outcome from the observations that were not. Note that the boundary is contestable and later courts may read it differently than you do.
- Disposition. Record what the court actually ordered: appeal allowed or dismissed, order set aside, new trial, remedy assessed elsewhere, costs.
Throughout, keep party argument out of the holding. A submission the court recites is not the court's view, and a submission the court rejects is often the most useful thing in the decision, provided your brief labels it as rejected argument rather than law.
A compact brief
Fictional teaching example — not legal authority.
Six fields from an invented appellate decision
| Field | Entry |
|---|---|
| Court and procedure | Invented appellate court of an imaginary region; appeal from a first-instance judgment that dismissed the claim after a hearing on affidavits. |
| Material facts | Two parties signed a short written arrangement. One party did not perform. The first-instance judge found the writing too vague to enforce and dismissed the claim. |
| Issue | Was the written arrangement enforceable despite the missing performance details? |
| Rule or test | An invented two-stage standard: first ask whether the parties intended to be bound, then ask whether the missing terms can be supplied by an objective external standard. |
| Holding | Yes. Intention to be bound was clear on the face of the writing, and the missing details were capable of being supplied objectively, so the dismissal could not stand. |
| Disposition | Appeal allowed; dismissal set aside; matter returned for determination of the remedy. |
Note what the entries avoid. The holding answers the issue and nothing more. The appellant's broader submission, that any signed writing should be enforced, appears nowhere in the holding, because the invented court did not adopt it. No proposition above is a statement of Canadian, Ontario or foreign law.
What the worksheet actually does
The tool is a blank structured worksheet. Every word in a finished brief is yours. The page does four mechanical things and no more.
- Presents the fields in a fixed order with per-field character limits, and flags a field that exceeds its limit.
- Counts how many core fields contain any content and shows that count as a presence meter. The meter measures presence, never quality: a field holding a single character counts the same as a paragraph.
- Renders a plain-text preview in a fixed section order, marking required fields you left empty as not provided.
- Copies that preview to your clipboard or sends the page to your printer when you ask it to.
There is no scoring of your analysis, no evaluation of whether your ratio is defensible, no summarization, no artificial intelligence and no suggestion engine. A complete-looking meter says only that boxes contain text.
| Supported | Not supported |
|---|---|
| Typing or pasting your own text into each field | Uploading a PDF, judgment file or transcript |
| Loading a clearly fictional example to see the structure | Parsing or reading a decision from a link or a database |
| Copying the fixed-order plain-text export | Noting up, citator checks or treatment history |
| Printing the worksheet for a paper copy | Doctrinal assessment of whether your holding or ratio is correct |
| Starting over with Reset, behind a confirmation prompt | Autosave, drafts, accounts or recovery of cleared work |
Where to go next
- Copy the finished brief into your own notes before you close the tab, because nothing is retained.
- Collect the authorities your brief relies on into the Table of Authorities Builder when you move from reading to writing.
- Return to the decision for anything your brief states in vague terms, since vagueness in a brief is usually unresolved reading rather than style.
Privacy, academic integrity and independence
Privacy on this page. The worksheet runs entirely in your browser. Field contents are never sent to a server, never appear in the page URL, and are never included in analytics or logs. Your text is held in page memory only: reloading the page or confirming Reset discards it immediately, and there is no autosave and no recovery. Copying the export or printing the page exposes that content to your own device's clipboard, printer and print-to-file destination. Because a browser is not a secure workspace, do not enter confidential client information, sealed materials, or anything covered by a publication ban or similar restriction.
Academic integrity. This is your brief, and submitting it means asserting that you read the decision and wrote the analysis. The tool produces no analysis to borrow. Confirm your course's expectations about brief format, permitted collaboration and the use of study aids.
Independence. LegalCalc Ontario is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any law school, faculty, court, publisher or citation guide, including McGill University, the McGill Law Journal and Thomson Reuters or Carswell. The field structure is a generic teaching pattern, not any institution's prescribed template.