Legal minds on legal matters and whatever else strikes our fancy.
As I explained last year, there may be no more daunting task in all Supreme Court practice than distilling a 9,000-word—or hopefully less—cert petition down to one or two Questions Presented. Although crafting QP’s are difficult, you can improve your QP’s by combining a few of the following techniques with lots of [...]
“F*** greedy law schools” seems to be the phrase of the day. At least on the blogosphere. A few weeks ago, David Segal had an excellent expose on the culture of greed that permeates the business of law school. He appropriately entitled his piece: “Law School Economics: Ka-Ching!” The NY Times followed [...]
Last Friday Cockle Law Brief Printing Company said farewell to Shon Hopwood. This week Shon and his family--Annie, Mark, and the new baby on the way--will move to Seattle so that Shon can attend law school at the University of Washington. He promised us three things before he left: that he would always be more [...]
I came across this recent piece at Thomson Reuters--Oracle Judge Okays Damning E-mail Despite Google Privilege Claim--and I got to marvel, from a refreshingly safe distance, all the ways that things can go wrong in a courtroom. In its patent infringement case against Google, the Oracle team prepared an exhibit binder for a July 21st [...]
I recently ran across a cool way to check whether my writing is readable. The tip comes from Ross Gubberman's book Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation's Top Advocates. I was unaware that Microsoft Word has a feature that measures the readibility of Word documents. Word generates a readibility report that is based on the [...]
We filed four merits briefs this week: the Petitioner's Reply in Reynolds v. U.S., No. 10-6549, filed on July 25, 2011; the Petitioner's Brief in Zivotofsky v. Clinton, No. 10-699, filed on July 29, 2011; the Brief of Intervenor Respondents In No. 09-958 and California Pharmacists Respondents in No. 09-1158 in Douglas v. Independent Living Center, [...]
Here’s a dilemma: you live in a great community, where you and your neighbors all know how great it is, and you also know that part of what makes it great is that not too many outsiders know how great it is. So what do you do when yet another media source--Kiplinger in this case--tells [...]