Legal News and Appellate Tips

Here are some recent news items of interest to attorneys and court-watchers:

💰California courts spent nearly half-billion dollars on court reporters, but that’s not enough.

📽So if a court reporter isn’t available, SB 662 would allow electronic recordings to create the appellate record.

📰The Judicial Council has invited comment on 6 proposed changes affecting appellate rules, including changing the notice of appeal form to allow the attorney to join the appeal (such as in appeal from sanctions against the attorney), and highlighting the requirement to specify the date of the order being appealed (so that it is not overlooked).

🛑Frustrated when a corporate defendant stays a case by appealing from a denial of a motion to compel arbitration? SB 365 would end the automatic stay for such appeals.

🏛Supreme Librarians: David Carrillo and Stephen Duvernay say that our state high court exists to maintain consistency and clarity in the law – not to correct errors.

Appellate attorney John Nielsen is forever grateful to his mentors when he was a young attorney, and he pays it forward now both as a mentor himself and by offering tips on legal writing published at the Appellate Advocacy Blog. John discusses his approach to training young associates, and to legal writing.

Then we turn to how Utah differs from California in civil and appellate procedure, including:

👉 Unlike CA, the UT Supreme Court promulgates its own rules that govern the courts.

👉 Perhaps as a result, in UT there is no court-reporter crisis. Instead, proceedings are electronically recorded. If you need a transcript, a court reporter will transcribe the recording. (This is an important #AccessToJustice issue.)

👉 Unlike CA, UT appellate decisions are binding on the appellate court. The court can overrule its past decisions, but it cannot just ignore them, as often happens in CA.

👉 Unlike CA, all UT appellate opinions are published.

👉 Unlike CA, UT appellants are not entitled to a reasoned opinion on affirmance—which is why many appeals are disposed of by order.

And in true appellate-nerd fashion, during the Lightning Round John and Tim briefly debate the exceptions to using ‘s to make possessives of certain words ending in s.