Legal News and Appellate Tips

We attorneys are trained to spot patterns, but many of us are poor at spotting patterns of inefficiency in the way we practice. Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson joins this episode of the California Appellate Law Podcast to explain how lawyers can adopt “systems thinking” to make their practice more effective, efficient, and even more fun.

Ernie shares how he learned about efficiency from his judge during his clerkship who, to shave time off the “Oyez, Oyez, Oyez” ceremony, cut the last “Oyez.” And how his judge delegated the task of explaining to new clerks about the edited “Oyez.” Now THAT is systems thinking!

Too abstract? How about a taste? Here are Ernie’s “gateway drugs” to get you hooked on legal tech:

• SaneBox — Most lawyers use some filtering to reduce email load, but SaneBox has really advanced filters that will find you spending less time in your inbox.

• TextExpander — Everyone sends out routine emails (think: retainer agreements). TextExpander populates an complete email with a macro. (And it will getting your gears turning about other ways to automate your day-to-day.)

• Automated Calendaring (e.g., Acuity, Calendly) — No attorney should be booking their own appointments.

Listen to the episode here: https://lnkd.in/gTDweCDf

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The Co-Founder of Casetext, Pablo Arredondo, explains how legal technology that is available today will allow solos and small firms to compete against Big Law. Tim and Jeff talk with Pablo about:

• Why Artificial Intelligence—which didn’t work well for a long time—now makes it much, much easier to find the legal authority you’re looking for.

• The searches you are used to making is just “casual Friday in the keyword prison.” But now, you can put real English sentences into Casetext’s Parallel Search and it works.

• Casetext’s A.I. isn’t limited to legal authority: you’ll be able to put your entire case file into a database and search for the evidence that supports the key facts in your case.

• This gives small firms an alternative to deploying armies of staff to find evidence in a voluminous file.

• Using Casetext’s Compose to create a first draft of a brief in a few minutes.

• A.I. might be able to replicate “murder boards” in the future for attorneys preparing for oral argument.

• In fact, the way “neural net” A.I. works is so impressive, Pablo describes it as a “black box,” and sometimes it is hard to describe what it does without using words like “thinking.”

Drawing from his experience training federal judges and top law lawyers how to write more effectively, Ross Guberman shares some of his best writing tips with Jeff Lewis and Tim Kowal on episode 33 of the California Appellate Law Podcast at www.CALPodcast.com.
Ross also gives a tour of his latest product, BriefCatch 3.0 (now available on Mac), a tool that scores legal briefs for engagement, readability, flow, punchiness, and clarity. Not sure how to take your writing from merely proper English to Elena Kagan? BriefCatch provides in-app examples of some of the best passages of Supreme Court justices.

Here are some of the tips Ross covers:

✍️ Why more judges are using pithy, attention-grabbing language—and why you shouldn’t imitate it in your briefs.
✍️ Rising above the fray without resorting to quips.
✍️ Getting the judge’s attention by tapping into three universal fears all judges have.
✍️ Discussing “bad facts” confidently, not defensively.
✍️ Using BriefCatch to improve your briefs.
✍️ Remember the purpose of legal writing is to help judges organize their thoughts—briefs are a tool, but aspire to make them tools that are a pleasure to use.