CHAPTER XX 
BRIEF MAKING 
Preliminary Work. When a person has a long argument 
to make, as a practitioner does in arguing a case before an 
appellate court, he needs more than an abstract of a case. 
He needs to have the abstracts of all the cases on his case 
cards which he has not discarded as worthless for his pur- 
poses ; memoranda of quotations from opinions, textbooks, and 
legal periodicals; statistics in regard to economic and social 
facts (and for a trial brief a preliminary examination of wit- 
nesses) ; and a theory of his case in mind — all woven into a 
connected argument enforced by references to his authorities. 
The last work is brief making . 119 A brief may be defined as 
“any abstract or memorandum intended as a guide in the 
trial (or argument) of a case”. 
Kinds of Briefs. In England the brief is prepared by the 
solicitor for the use of the barrister, and contains only such 
matters as will indicate to the barrister the essential features 
of the case which he is to try. This would include an abstract 
of the pleadings, and an abstract of the evidence, together 
with the names of the witnesses and their peculiarities. The 
English brief tells what the case is, but does not argue it. In 
the United States, there are two kinds of briefs: the trial 
brief and the brief on appeal. The trial brief partakes some- 
what of the nature of an English brief, but it goes further 
and contains a memorandum of the facts and the law. The 
brief on appeal is unlike both the trial brief and the English 
brief. It is generally a skeleton of the argument on the law, 
is prepared by the attorney who is to argue the case, and is 
intended for the guidance of the court more than counsel, 
whereas the English brief and trial brief are for the guid- 
ance of counsel only. 
Trial Brief. A trial brief is a complete memorandum of 
one side of a lawsuit, prepared in an orderly way for the 
guidance of a trial attorney, following as nearly as possible 
the sequence of events which the trial is expected to follow, 
and containing all the information necessary to enable him 
119 Sunderland and Redfield, in Brief Making; Lawyers’ Cooperative Publishing Co., 
Law Books and their Use. 
( 229 ) 
