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October 23, 2002
Appeals
Appeals
Luckily I have been distracted by a research request from a colleague which is likely to lead to my writing an appellate brief for him. (I do research projects on a variety of topics for another attorney to help pay the bills.) It should be fun, it involves a procedural issue in "release of judgment" case (that's probably only interesting to me so I won't go into details), and it's in an Oklahoma court. I like doing appeals there, the procedural requirements are fairly straight-forward & easily met, and their on-line research website is wonderful. Unlike Arkansas, which is none of these.Case in point: I was browsing today's released rulings from Ark. Court of Appeals and ran across a case that had been sent back for re-briefing (ouch!) for failure to include in the addendum several motions made in the original trial court. I've done several appeals here in Arkansas, and all I can say is that whomever designed their appellate procedural rules has got to be obsessed with minutia. You have to do an abstract, which is basically an written statement of everything, and I do mean everything, that has happened from day one. The addendum must include basically every document filed, whether it is related to your issue on appeal or not. It's a huge pain, and takes hours of painstaking proofreading. Ugh! And if you screw up, your client's appeal can get dismissed for failure to comply with the rules.
Apparently the attorney in this case missed some documents, which is easily done, so now has to re-brief. The appellate court gave him or her 15 days to re-file the abstract, the addendum, and the brief, and was quite clear that just correcting the omission would not be accepted. Everything had to be re-done. Also, if the opposing party chooses to re-file their brief, the client of the attorney that screwed up has to pay all costs for that. For all you non-attorneys, this is a major smack upside the head for the offending attorney. If their filing was shoddily done, which I've seen, then it's a well-deserved punishment. Painful for the offending attorney, but at least the appeal didn't get dismissed.
And people wonder why I primarily practice in Oklahoma.
Posted by Rita at October 23, 2002 12:18 PM