Facts, opinions, samples, and ranking the issues

Three kinds of sentence in a case

A case brief is written to sound uniform, and it is not. Every sentence is one of three things. A fact can be verified — a count, a date, a figure from a statement. An opinion is a judgement — someone's view, however senior. An inference is a conclusion drawn from facts — it may be sound, but it is only as good as the facts and the reasoning under it. The stage-2 rubric's each issue stated with a fact means a fact in this sense; an issue built on a character's opinion collapses when the marker asks "says who?"

Worked example — four Lakeshore sentences

• "The press broke down fourteen times last year." Fact — a count from the maintenance log; verifiable.
• "Our vendor is the best in Ontario." (Priya.) Opinion — a judgement, and one with an interest behind it; it becomes evidence only when a comparison supports it.
• "On-time delivery fell from 96 % to 84 %." Fact — from the job records.
• "If we don't fix delivery, we'll lose the government account." (Priya.) Inference — from the threat (a fact: the account said so) to the loss (a prediction). Reasonable, but it is a forecast and should be labelled one.

The habit: read every sentence in the brief with a pencil and write F, O or I in the margin. Issues are built on the Fs; the Os and Is go into the assumptions list or get evidence found for them.

Two traps with numbers

Small samples. Preview of the Kestrel case in module 11: a supplier, Sable Peak, shows a 3.8 % defect rate — but the spike came from one shipment. One shipment, one quarter, one month is not a trend; it is a data point. Before an issue is built on it, ask how many observations lie behind the number and whether the next period looks the same. Fourteen breakdowns across a year, with a repair bill that has risen for three years, is a trend. One bad month is not.

Base rates. How common something is changes what a signal means. If nine in ten presses of this age break down at this rate, the fourteen breakdowns are a fact about ageing presses, not about Lakeshore's operators; if one in ten does, something local is wrong. The base rate is usually not in the brief — it is the external fact stage 2 goes looking for (lessons 6 and 7).

Ranking the issues

A case has several issues; the rubric wants them ranked by impact on objectives and, as this course adds, by urgency. Impact: how much of a stakeholder's objective the issue puts at risk. Urgency: how soon the damage becomes irreversible. Not: how loudly it was raised, how easy it is to fix, or how new it is. Lakeshore, ranked:

1. Delivery — high impact ($75,600 of margin at 42 % on the two threatening accounts' $180,000) and urgent (they are deciding now).
2. Rising repair cost — high impact ($38,000 and climbing; the status quo is not stable) but less urgent: it bleeds monthly rather than breaking at once.
3. The tickets — Marcus Doyle, the vendor's rep, has offered two Leafs tickets and asked for the lease quote. Low financial impact; high urgency to disclose, because the moment it is accepted or the quote shared, the analyst's objectivity is gone and cannot be recovered. An ethical issue is an issue: it goes on the list, ranked, not in a footnote.

Classify and rank for the clinic

"Missed appointments run at about 12 %" (Tomas) — an estimate: an inference from memory, to be treated as a fact only once counted. "Two patients were double-booked last month" — a fact. "Our patients are older and won't book online" (a receptionist) — an opinion, and a testable one. Ranked: no-shows first (impact — revenue every week), double-bookings second (lower frequency, but each costs a patient's trust), the online-booking objection third (a risk to a fix, not a problem yet). Now do the same for a brief you have not seen: mark F, O, I; find the small samples; rank by impact, then urgency.