Accounting Case Brief

FORMAT FOR A CASE BRIEF

Tax researchers often must analyze court cases to determine what guidance they offer in arriving at a recommendation for a current client's situation. During the research process, practitioners will often produce a case brief for key cases to save time when they may have to return to the client issues at a later time. The case brief is basically a summary of the key points of a tax case. One format that is often used to brief a case is as follows:

CASE CITATION (This section provides the complete cite for the case.)

FACTS (A brief summary of the facts is included in this section. This section will also include who brought the suit and what has happened with the case prior to this court report, including what happened in the lower courts if this case has been appealed.)

ISSUE(S) (This section normally contains a numbered list of the issues that were examined in the case. Note that the order of the issues in this list generally establishes the order of results in the holdings and analysis)

HOLDINGS (This section summarizes the results of case. If the case has been appealed, this section will often note what the original court decided as well as the appellate court's treatment of that decision. There generally should be a short concise statement of the holding for each corresponding issue.)

ANALYSIS (This section briefly summarizes how the court reached its holdings. This section will normally consist of numbered reasons that correspond to each of the issues enumerated in the "issue" section so that the reader can easily follow the court's logic for each issue.)

A good case brief requires more than just copying these sections out of the case report itself. Instead, in a good case brief, you will summarize this information concisely in your own words. Typically, a good case brief is limited to one page in length (and I have chosen the court cases for this course with this guideline in mind. In other words, your case brief should be one page).