RECENT APPELLATE NEWS AND NOTES

[Posted December 5, 2010] Here’s a quick report on a few recent developments in the Virginia appellate field.

Appellate Practice Institute set
As I mentioned in a recent post, the ABA’s 15th Appellate Practice Institute has been scheduled for May 20-22, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois. If you want to sharpen your appellate skills, then you really should go to this program at least once in your life. If you’re serious about developing an appellate practice of your own, you must attend; no excuses permitted.

In my opinion, this is the finest appellate-training program in the United States of America. ‘Nuff said.

SCV writ schedules now online
The Supreme Court has added a new page to its website, on which it lists the cases that will be argued in upcoming writ sessions. Here’s a link to that page. It won’t tell you what the cases are about – there’s no shortcut way to do that yet – but you can see the names of counsel of record. The listing doesn’t give you specific times or disclose which writ panel a given case has been assigned to (the court guards that secret very closely, so you won’t know which panel has your case until you show up to argue).

I thank Virginia Lawyers Weekly’s Alan Cooper for telling me about this welcome new feature, which was added to the SCV’s website without any fanfare. In fact, we owe the existence of this page to Alan, because as I understand it, he’s the one who gently pestered the folks at Ninth and Franklin to list writ arguments online.