Tag Archive for: Kendall Gray

What Do Appellate Lawyers Do

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Leave this blog right now and run, don’t walk, over to the Appellate Record and read Kendall Gray’s blog post on what distinguishes appellate lawyers from trial lawyers. A presentation he gave to visitors to his firm from China inspired this post. It provides the simplest explanation of the key differences between the two types of practice that I’ve never thought of. It’s the perfect thing for the appellate lawyer to bring to the next family reunion, picnic, initial client interview, or for consultation in an ongoing case when you have to explain, again, why you can’t tell the appellate court about “all of those people who got up on that witness stand and told all those lies.”

Choosing Fonts for E-filing to Cater to Screen or Page

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Some weeks back I wrote about whether lawyers should write for the screen or for the page in the era of e-filing (you can e-file in the Georgia Supreme Court and Court of Appeals now). It turns out that there is a way to hedge your bets, at least in terms of font selection. Kendall Gray, over at The Appellate Record, has teamed up with Matthew Butterick (I wrote about his excellent book earlier) to figure out the best fonts to choose when your appellate panel may either print your brief out or read it on the screen. Part 1 gives you the short answer. Part 2 gives you the even nerdier explanation (and nerd is not a perjorative term spoken from this law-nerd).

The answer is that, as long as you are submitting your brief as a pdf, you don’t have to use a screen-optimized font. Now, as to what font is best for a brief, take a look at Typography for Lawyers. It’s even reviewed over at MacSparky, my very favorite law-nerd sight (David Sparks doesn’t focus on the fact that he’s a lawyer, but it comes out a lot in his writing and in his Mac Power Users Podcast).

How Your Brief Looks is Nearly as Important as What You Say

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Design is an important part of brief writing. And the font and layout you choose will have an impact on how the Court receives your brief. It certainly shapes how I feel about writing the brief and submitting it. I cannot see the Courier New Font without thinking of the research, writing, and advocacy in my first year of law school. The font feels scary and oppressive and conjures up images of red ink and biting comments written in the margins.

The people who read your briefs at the courts where you submit them are likely reading a stack of briefs that look pretty much like yours. “Oh look,” the staff attorney might be saying, “another brief in Times New Roman 14. Awesome.”

I’m guilty of going with the good old default font a good bit of the time, but I am learning to do things differently.

Two of my favorite legal blogs have featured posts on this very topic. Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield features a review of Matthew Buttrick’s Typography for Lawyers. I haven’t ordered it yet, but I likely will. One great tip that I read elsewhere is to eliminate the double space at the end of sentences. I’ve been doing that since my tenth-grade typing teacher told me to do it. I stopped after reading somewhere else that I should. That extra space is not necessary, it turns out. In fact, as I review Mr. Butterick’s book for this post, I think I’m about to order it. You probably will too if you check out the sample chapters (PDF) from his website.

My other favorite blogger, Kendall Gray, has been writing about layout and typography at his blog, the Appellate Record.  He has written a three-part series about page layout. Part one introduces his general idea of how a brief should look. Part two focuses on the concept of proximity. His third post deals with justification (no, I have not lapsed into theological discourse. I’m talking about how the text should be aligned).

By no means do I suggest that the document’s appearance is a substitute for its substantive content. Rather, designing the brief into a document that the reader wants to read, a document that does not appear just like the other briefs the clerk is reading in that big stack, and that looks better than the one the DA is submitting, is important.

I’ve just scratched the surface on the design element. And I look forward to learning more about it. All they taught me in law school was the importance of the ugly Courier font and something mechanical about a rule proof. It does’t mean that you won’t lose to bad writing sometimes (that’s what representing the appellant in criminal cases is like sometimes). It just means that the close case might just go your way more often than it does right now.

Dating Do’s and Don’ts for the Georgia Appellate Lawyer

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Since I’ve started this whole blogging thing, I’ve made it a point to put fantastic bloggers who are great at it into my RSS Reader. Kendall Gray’s Blog, the Appellate Record, is a great resource even though he does his craft over in Texas. He always has something to teach me about writing, appellate strategy. He even has fascinating stuff to say about bow ties.

In his latest blog post, Write As I Say, Not As I do, Mr. Gray writes about dating. Before he gets there, he pins bad lawyer writing on judges who wrote the old judicial opinions that we read in law school. He also thinks that many of the writing tips judges dispense at seminars and in bar journals aren’t actually followed in judicial writing. And bad judicial writing just leads to more bad writing from lawyers.

Getting Convicted in a Sunday Morning Sort of Way

Then he moves to his example of bad writing. And if it were a sermon, this Baptist lawyer would say that he “feels convicted.”

Lawyers and judges really suck at writing about when things happened. Or, as Mr. Gray puts it, “More than once I have wanted to hurl myself from the office window upon reading work product whose only reason for being was to regurgitate a chronology from the trial lawyer’s three ring binder.”

Do you know what he’s talking about? Have you ever read or have you ever written a statement of facts that starts out like this: “On or about October 13, 2006, Officer Smith pulled over John Davis’s car. He ultimately searched the car and found suspected cocaine. On December 20, 2007, the crime lab tested the substance.” Then you start talking about the trial, and you start saying stuff like, “The trial commenced on May 3, 2009, and the jury reached its verdict on May 17, 2009.”

I’ll tell it all (back to Baptist speak). I’ll give my testimony. Why do we lawyers sometimes write like this. It’s some straight up bad storytelling technique. But we’re not trained to be storytellers. If we were, it was beaten out of us in the first year of law school when we started viewing people’s life events as “fact patterns.”

 

Relative Dating (It’s Not the Same Thing as Dating Relatives)

Bad chronology is a good way to get a Statement of Facts on paper with minimal effort.

The alternative? Gray suggests, “relative dating.” Don’t worry, I’m not making an Alabama reference. Relative dating, he explains, involves

put[ting] events in relation to each other and giv[ing] useful information about the passage of time where it matters, such as: before, after, very shortly, or more than two years after the accident

So, think twice before you put a date in your brief. Does the date advance your narrative or your client’s cause (the way it might in a Speedy Trial Demand or Statute of Limitations issue). Otherwise, you might want to consider relative dating to get the story out there.

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