Louisiana Civil Appeals

If you sign up for e-filing with the La. Supreme Court, ...

If you register for e-filing with the Louisiana Supreme Court, here is a tip that may save you some time: You must enter your contact information exactly as it appears in the Louisiana State Bar Association’s membership directory. If your e-file registration information does not match your LSBA directory information exactly, the administrator will reject your application. This goes not just for your e-mail address, but also for your other contact information. I recommend that you pull up your LSBA directory info in one browser window or tab, pull up the e-file registration form in another, and copy and paste from the directory to the registration form.

I didn’t know this until I tried to register myself; it took three tries over two working days to give them exactly what they wanted. Part of the problem is that I have more than one office e-mail address; another part is the variety of ways one can address mail to the 45th floor of One Shell Square. Nevertheless, after two rejection e-mails, I figured it out.

Here is another tip: Don’t wait until you have to file something before registering. It will take the administrator about a day to approve or reject your registration. You can telephone someone if you need immediate approval, but you probably don’t want to add this to your list of deadline-day anxieties. Because of the way the process works, the time to register is when you’re not up against a deadline.

Check out my appellate blogroll

I just did a little tidying up of my appellate blogroll, which you’ll find in the right column near the bottom. I deleted some blogs that have not been updated in more than two months. And I added the IMLA Appellate Practice Blog, produced by the International Municipal Lawyers Association. Among its offerings are writing tips and appellate-court news. One of the contributors is Ann Schwing, whom I know through Scribes.

So check out the appellate blogroll. It now includes 23 appellate blogs from across the country. If you know of a worthwhile appellate blog that’s not listed, send me an e-mail and we’ll see about curing the omission.

Several opinions released today by the La. Supreme Court

If you have any cases that have already been orally argued in the Louisiana Supreme Court, you should check the Court’s latest press release. I counted 19 opinions released today.

Free La. appellate CLE stuff

This afternoon, I co-presented an hour of CLE on appellate practice for the Louisiana State Bar Association’s “Bridging the Gap” seminar, a program for newly minted lawyers who passed the February 2014 bar exam. For attendees and anyone else who may be interested, here are some supplemental materials used or discussed in the presentation:

• A PDF copy of  my PowerPoint presentation
• Recent amendments of the Uniform Rules of Louisiana Courts of Appeal, effective May 1, 2014
• Two entertaining and informative articles by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Ninth Circuit:
• In Praise of Moot Court—Not!, in which Judge Kozinski discusses the differences between law-school moot-court competitions and real-world appellate practice
• The Wrong Stuff, in which Judge Kozinski offers tips to help you lose your next appeal

If you’re looking for samples of appellate pleadings and briefs, I have some collected at this prior blog post. I cannot vouch for their currentness, because the Uniform Rules have been updated twice since I uploaded them. So use them if you must, but don’t trust them, because they were written under a different set of rules.