Legal English scholars and educators have increasingly emphasized the linguistic conventions and conceptual resources acquired as part of “learning to think like a lawyer” (Mertz 2007). Much of this work targets Legal English conventions at the register or genre level (e.g., Bhatia 1993; Tessuto 2015). However, recent work also highlights important genre-internal variation as writers pursue local-level functional goals (e.g., Casal et al. 2021). We similarly argue that genre-internal analysis of legal genres will reveal local-level functions and linguistic resources of value to both readers and writers within Legal English pedagogy. To exemplify the approach, we analyzed the facts sections of 80 U.S. contracts case reports. First, relying on local linguistic, content-oriented, and discourse level cues, we conducted a functional analysis to develop an analytical framework to segment the texts into “narrative phases”. Next, we ran a keyword and semantic field analysis using WMatrix to identify items that occurred more than expected in particular narrative stages based on their frequency in other stages. Findings suggest that analysis and subsequent teaching of internal variation can inform Legal English curricula by empowering teachers and students to examine genre-specific local-level functional affordances and meaning potentials of linguistic resources in context.