Cockle Legal Briefs is the nation’s leading preparer of United States Supreme Court briefs. We specialize in preparing the booklet brief format described in Supreme Court Rule 33.1.
The required booklet format is extremely specific and unusual. Very few copy shops—or even general commercial printers—have the expertise or equipment to prepare a Supreme Court booklet.
Cockle Legal Briefs prints Supreme Court booklets onto a 6 1/8 by 9 1/4 inch page of at least 60-pound weight paper. We then cover the booklet in 65-pound paper. Depending on the size of the document, we bind either by stapling through the spine—saddle stitching—or by a hot glue method—PerfectBind. Within certain technical limits, we can bind over 500 pages into a single volume. We then trim the booklet to the required size, leaving a clean cut down the edges.
For smaller documents, generally 65 pages or less, we bind using a saddle stitching device. Our printing staff feeds the printed and stacked pages into the machine, which aligns, folds, and staples the pages together.
On this day, the Cockle Legal Briefs printing department completed work on several merits-stage amicus briefs supporting the respondent. We bind bottom-side amicus briefs in a dark green cover. Rule 33.1(g)(xii).
For stitched briefs, we then use a crimping machine to complete the fold to a clean, even line.
We bind larger documents using a hot glue process that fixes the individual pages to the cover binding. This machine melts glue pellets (in the clear cup on the left), applies the paste to the cover, presses the pages into the binding, and then shaves off any excess glue.
Finally, we trim the booklets using a hydraulic cutter. On big printing days, Cockle Legal Briefs staff members throughout the building can feel the thud of the blade slicing through the stacks of briefs we have reviewed, formatted, read, and edited.
The documents Cockle Legal Briefs prepares for the Supreme Court are texts of unsurpassed elegance and scholarly application. The research is exhaustive, and the prose graceful. But nothing can be read by the Justices until after we print those words onto paper, and feed them into the industrial machinery of a professional brief printing process.
To ensure that your next United States Supreme Court document is filed in a form that will command the respect of your reader, contact Cockle Legal Briefs.