Finding the case law that decides your point

What happens when you ask for authority

A decision that settles your point was written about someone else's facts, in the Commission's language, often years before you asked. The words you would use to describe your situation are rarely the words it uses - which is why searching case law by keyword returns decisions that mention your topic rather than decisions that decide it.

Frank builds the search the way a practitioner would, from three things:

• the issue, framed as a decision would frame it
• the holdings that would have to be made for the point to go your way
• your side - the position the authority has to support

Where documents are on the matter file, the facts they establish frame the question as well, so you are not retyping your own matter into a search box.

Ask it the way you would ask a colleague

Plain English works. What helps is saying what actually happened, and what you want the authority for.

"We engaged a casual through a labour hire firm and ended the placement. He says he was dismissed. Is there authority on whether ending a placement is a dismissal for the purposes of the Act?"

Three things in that question do real work: the facts, the question of law, and implicitly whose side you are on. A bare topic - "labour hire case law" - gives Frank the topic and nothing else, and the list will be broader for it.

Say which way you are arguing. "Is there anything that supports the employer's position?" and "what would the applicant run against us?" are different searches and should return different lists. Frank orders what it finds for the side you name.

Reading what comes back

A list of authorities is only useful if you can tell at a glance which rows are worth opening. Each row carries the decision, what it held, and which way it went. A labour hire question of the kind above returns rows like these:

Alongside each of these, Frank shows the finding on record for that decision - the ratio as the Commission stated it, not a precis of the whole judgment. That column is the point of the list: it lets you discard four rows in five without opening anything.

Narrowing keeps the search

Refining is a conversation, not a fresh start:

"Only labour hire cases." "Just Full Bench decisions." "Anything since the amendments."

Each of these narrows what is already on the table. Frank holds the issue, the holdings and your side, and applies the new filter to them - so a second question does not throw away the work of the first.

Opening one

Ask Frank to read a decision and the finding on record for it leads the answer. The discussion is written underneath that finding, with quotes located in the decision itself, so the summary cannot drift away from what was actually held.

Name two or more and you get a comparison. Put several citations in one message and Frank reads each of them and lays them out together - what each held, how they differ, and which sits closest to your facts - before any prose.

What it tells you rather than guesses

• Currency. The law moves. Where a decision predates a change that matters to your question, Frank says so rather than handing you an authority that no longer states the law.
• Silence. If the corpus holds nothing on the point, that is what you are told. An answer that names no authority beats one that names the wrong authority confidently.
• Reach. What it searched, and what it could not read, is said plainly, so a short list is never mistaken for a complete one.

Habits that get better answers

1. Give it the facts, not the topic. Two sentences of what happened beats a three-word subject every time.
2. Say your side. It changes the ordering, and it should.
3. Put your documents on the file first. A search framed by the actual application is sharper than one framed by your memory of it.
4. Narrow in the same conversation. Starting again loses the frame you built.
5. Read the holding before the summary. If the holding does not help you, the summary will not either.