The Appellate Appendix
A way to streamline appellate review of your case and let the judges focus on what matters most: the substance of the appeal and your clients’ allegations of error below
Image is paperwork uploaded to Flickr by Erich Ferdinand and (c) August 2014, which can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/erix/15151598439/in/gallery-196193748@N08-72157720906157116/ The Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license for this work can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode.
“The reader’s time is more important than the writer’s time.”
That’s one of the first things I learned in law school. And, it makes sense.
If the extra time spent by an associate on a memo helps the partner make the right strategic decision, then it’s worth it. If a motion can be just that much clearer to the judge, then it’s worth it. After all, a judge who doesn’t understand what you’re asking for isn’t going to grant relief.
Some of my mentors used to take this principle to the extreme, saying that if the writer can spend 10 hours to save the reader just 10 minutes, then it’s worth it. Whatever the right balance may be, legal culture has an unwritten rule that reader time is more valuable than writer time.
As a practicing lawyer, I’ve experienced this reality firsthand on many occasions.
One of the many places I experienced this reader-over-writer aspect of legal culture as an appellate litigator is in the preparation of the record for appellate review. My team and I had to prepare an appellate appendix for each appeal and it’s a surprising amount of work.
I used to wonder why we were doing all this work and then I realized it’s yet one more application of the maxim I learned in law school: it’s one way of using writer (lawyer) time to save reader (court) time.
Appellate courts hear cases from multiple trial courts, so if the record from various trial courts can be standardized into one appellate appendix format, the appellate judges can spend less time on the record conventions of the trial court and more time focused on the appeal. It’s one way that an appellate litigator can save their judges some time.
True, the appellate record is already set when the notice of appeal is filed. Nonetheless, the counsel (mostly the appellants’ counsel) can format that record below into a newly paginated appendix that fits with what the appellate judges are used to, i.e., according to that appellate court’s tradition and practice.
It’s not optional nowadays; it’s required. And, it’s just one more way that writers can save reader some time—but it is a lot of work.
The surprising amount of time required to do an appellate appendix and the economies of scale that you can achieve from doing it repeatedly is a key reason our team here at JAMsolved is offering this service first. Some of us are appellate litigators ourselves and we are committed to helping other appellate litigators focus on their cases, not on record preparation.
The simple reality is that lawyers’ most important job is to persuade the court and, beyond selecting what materials should be in the appendix, preparation of the appendix is ministerial. Those ministerial tasks that go beyond selecting what should (and must) be included in the appendix are labor intensive, but completing them doesn’t help the lawyer win the appeal. Lawyer and paralegal time is better spent on the case.
That’s why we think it’s best if appendix work is done by your committed team of partners here at JAMsolved, rather than by lawyers and paralegals who know the case, that’s win-win. Working with a team of dedicated legal-support professionals, I developed streamlined processes that allow my team to make appendices according to the exacting specifications of appellate courts and do so quickly.
I look forward to sharing my team’s expertise with you at affordable prices so that you can do what you do best: presenting your case in your brief.