Appellate Law & Practice

DRI Appellate Advocacy Seminar

If you’re looking for some quality appellate CLE in 2008, consider registering for the DRI Appellate Advocacy Seminar, to be held February 28-29 in Orlando, Florida. The program includes the following speakers you may have heard of:

• Ruth Anne Robbins, who will present tips for formatting visually persuasive briefs.
• Dahlia Lithwick, who will give the audience of lawyers a journalist’s perspective on writing compelling factual statements and weaving them into arguments.
• Luther Munford, an appellate lawyer with Phelps Dunbar in Jackson, Mississippi, who will discuss means for winning an appeal that you won’t find written in the rules.

For those working for corporate clients (DRI’s membership), the faculty includes four in-house lawyers (from 3M, Cooper Tire & Rubber Co., MetLife, and Aon Corp. respectively), three of whom will participate in a panel discussion about what they expect from their appellate counsel at trial. And for fellow AL&P blogger S. Cotus, there will be a presentation by a panel of three appellate judges who “will lend their perspectives regarding best practices and ‘dos and don'ts’ with respect to both written and oral arguments.”

For more information, visit DRI’s web site or download the brochure.

2007 Summit for Appellate Judges, Lawyers, and Staff Attorneys

The Appellate Judges Educational Institute is holding a four-day program in Washington, D.C. on September 27–30, 2007. The program is co-sponsored by the ABA Judicial Division’s Appellate Judges Conference, Coucil of Appellate Lawyers, and Council of Appellate Staff Attorneys. To read the agenda, click here. To download the flyer, click here. For registration forms, click here.

Free Louisiana appellate stuff

In about an hour, I will present the appellate portion of the Bridging the Gap seminar organized by the Louisiana State Bar Association. For anyone who may be interested, I've uploaded my seminar materials, PDF of my PowerPoint presentation, plus a few extra goodies. With the exception of one article (How to Write an Appellate Brief), all this stuff deals with Louisiana appellate procedure. If you're interested, please visit The (New) Legal Writer to browse and download.

Council of Appellate Lawyers and Appellate Judges Summit

The ABA's Council of Appellate Lawyers and Appellate Judges Conference are putting on a joint program for lawyers and appellate judges. The program will be held in Dallas on November 9-11, 2006. Usually the attendance is split around 50-50 between judges and lawyers, so if you're a lawyer who likes face time with judges, or a judge who likes face time with lawyers, then you'll enjoy this program. (An anecdote: A lawyer friend of mine who attended this conference a couple of years ago found himself sharing a taxi with a Third Circuit judge by the name of Alito.) If you're interested in registering, click here to download the brochure.

9th Circuit appellate workshop

Here is a brochure for an appellate-practice workshop being offered by the Federal Bar Association and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. To participate in this workshop, you have to write a short brief — "filing" deadline is September 15. The workshop itself will be held on the afternoons of October 25–26 at the Ninth Circuit courthouse in San Francisco. There, an appellate judge or experienced appellate lawyer will critique your brief. There will also be presentations on brief-writing topics and, on the second afternoon, a mock oral argument of the case.

Judicial Conference of the Sixth Circuit

The 66th Sixth Circuit Judicial Conference will be held May 17 -20, 2006 at the Marriott Detroit Renaissance Center. This is an open Conference and all attorneys admitted to practice in the federal courts in the Sixth Circuit are cordially invited to attend. For more info: http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/internet/index.htm The Eastern District of Michigan Chapter of the Federal Bar Association has announced that it will offer scholarships for a limited number of public service attorneys, newer lawyers and law students who are members of the Michigan State Bar or students at law schools located in Michigan. For more info: http://www.fbamich.org/index.cfm.cfm?location=20&RecordID=40

For Louisiana appellate lawyers: Free CLE stuff

On Minor Wisdom, I've posted some materials from a CLE session I taught this afternoon. It was the appellate hour of the Louisiana State Bar Association's Bridging the Gap program, a two-day seminar designed for newly minted lawyers to "bridge the gap" between law school and professional practice. My materials are all based on Louisiana statutes and Louisiana court rules, so they're only good for Louisiana practitioners.

Upcoming appellate seminars

Attention appellate lawyers: Here are some upcoming seminars you should know about.

First: DRI (Defense Research Institute) is holding its appellate seminar on March 9-10, 2006 in Phoenix, Arizona. Details are here. As a member of the DRI Appellate Advocacy Committee, I may be biased, but DRI seminars as a rule are very good, and the appellate seminars (I've attended all of them) have been excellent.

Second: I'm informed by La. Supreme Court Justice (Retired) Harry Lemmon (a friend and sometimes adversary) that the ABA Council of Appellate Lawyers and Appellate Judges' Conference will hold their joint seminar in Dallas, Texas on November 9-11, 2006. The attendance at this seminar is usually split 50-50 between lawyers and judges, so it's a great opportunity for the two groups to get to know each other socially.

For the immediate future, Harry and I will present a one-hour session on Louisiana appellate practice as part of the La. State Bar Association's Bridging the Gap program, a two-day seminar for newly minted lawyers, designed to "bridge the gap" between law school and law practice. The seminar will be held on January 26-27 in New Orleans; Harry's and my presentation will be on Friday, Jan. 27 at 1:30 p.m. We plan to present the nuts-and-bolts for filing appellate briefs, applications for supervisory writs, and (in the La. Supreme Court) applications for writs of certiorari or review.

Program for DRI Appellate Seminar

DRI has published the program for its next appellate-advocacy seminar, to be held March 9-10, 2006 in Phoenix, Arizona. Click here to see the schedule, or click here to download the brochure.

Commercial and government feeds

At least three firms seems to be putting out (several dozen) RSS feeds:  Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr; Clark Wilson LLP; Stark & Stark.  Tnx Larry Bodine.  See our earlier post on RSS here.  Firstgov has a list of government feeds here.