# Case summary — single opinion

Turns the full text of one judicial opinion into a structured working summary: posture, facts, issues, holding, reasoning, dicta. Reach for it when you pulled a case and need to know in five minutes whether it helps you.

## Prompt

## Context
You are a legal research assistant working for a litigation attorney in [JURISDICTION]. The attorney needs a working summary of one judicial opinion. The full text is pasted below. Work only from that text. Do not add outside cases, facts, or law.

## Task
Summarize the opinion. Produce these sections in order:
1. Caption — case name, court, date, and citation as given in the pasted text.
2. Procedural posture — how the case reached this court, two sentences or fewer.
3. Facts — only the facts the court relied on. Five sentences maximum.
4. Issues — each legal question the court decided, stated as a question.
5. Holding — the answer to each issue, one sentence each, with a pointer to where in the pasted text the court states it.
6. Reasoning — the steps the court took to each holding. Name the authorities the court leaned on hardest.
7. Disposition — affirmed, reversed, remanded, or other.
8. Dicta and limits — statements an attorney might be tempted to cite that are not the holding. Concurrences or dissents and what they would change.
9. Relevance — two sentences on how the opinion bears on this question: [ISSUE YOU ARE RESEARCHING].

## Standards
- Quote holding language exactly. Mark every direct quote with quotation marks and its location in the pasted text.
- Label dicta as dicta. Do not promote passing remarks to holdings.
- Plain English. No opinion on whether the decision is right.
- If the pasted text is incomplete, or the opinion never addresses [ISSUE YOU ARE RESEARCHING], say so. Do not fill gaps.
If anything you need is missing, ask before answering.

[FULL TEXT OF OPINION]

## Input checklist

- [ ] Full text of the opinion from Westlaw, Lexis, or the official reporter — not a headnote, syllabus, or blog summary.
- [ ] The issue you are researching, stated in one sentence.
- [ ] Jurisdiction and court level, so you can weigh the summary's relevance.
- [ ] Confidentiality: the opinion is public, but strip your client notes, matter names, and work-product annotations before pasting. Confirm your AI tool sits under your firm's confidentiality and bar guidance (see ABA Formal Op. 512 (2024)).

## Verification checklist

- [ ] Read the holding section against the opinion itself. Confirm every quoted phrase appears where the summary says it does, word for word.
- [ ] Confirm the summary added nothing: no facts, no authorities, no reasoning that is not in the pasted text. AI tools blend in remembered law from similar cases.
- [ ] Check the dicta labels. Would the issuing court treat the flagged language as binding? Misclassifying holding as dicta cuts both ways.
- [ ] Pull the case in Westlaw or Lexis and KeyCite or Shepardize it. Confirm it is still good law on your issue: not overruled, not superseded, no negative treatment.
- [ ] Verify every other case or statute the summary mentions. Each one must exist, say what the summary claims, and be current. Read it before you repeat it anywhere. Never cite authority you have not read — AI-invented citations are the leading malpractice risk with these tools.
- [ ] Confirm procedural posture and disposition against the opinion. AI tools transpose affirmed and reversed more often than you would expect.
- [ ] Confirm the citation format and reporter volume against the official source before the citation enters any draft.

## Customization notes

Works on administrative decisions, arbitration awards, and trial court orders — swap the section list to match (an agency decision needs standard of review and deference posture). For appellate brief work, add a section pulling the standard of review the court applied. If you summarize many cases on one issue, run this per case, then feed the outputs to the line-of-cases synthesis prompt.

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From The Solo Attorney's AI Practice Library — vetslearn.com/libraries/attorney