The look of the Supreme Court brief has not changed much over the past few decades, but the process used to produce it sure has. For most of the Supreme Court’s history, something other than a computer with word-processing was used to create a Supreme Court brief. Typesetting (known as word-processing today) was a long and laborious process performed on a Linotype machine. The completed, printed brief was the result of lines and lines of movable type, called “slugs” which were set in long forms called “gallies” and then printed page by page before assembly and binding. Today, once-difficult word-processing tasks such as inserting a word into a sentence or right-justifying your text can be done with just the push of a button or the click of a mouse.
As recently as 2000, hot metal typesetting was still being used by at least one major Supreme Court brief printer. However, this antiquated method of setting movable type began to fall out of favor in the 1980s and 1990s when computers with word-processing programs became widely available. Once this transition took place, the speed of producing Supreme Court documents increased dramatically and the attorney was able to become more involved in the setting up of the document.
The internet and the PDF file have made the process of producing Supreme Court briefs a lot simpler and a lot quicker. Court opinions required for a petition’s appendix can often be easily obtained in PDF format by a simple Google search. Briefs can be emailed to us in Word or WordPerfect and formatted to comply with the Court’s format requirements in as little as a day or two. At Cockle Legal Briefs, we even offer a camera-ready service where the attorney emails us a print-ready PDF to be printed and filed all in the same day!
Despite all of the amazing technological advances we have seen, you still need a Supreme Court brief printer you can trust with ensuring that your brief will meet the Court’s strict formatting rules. Producing a Supreme Court brief is still a very tedious project. What technology has done is allow us to work on a shorter timeline thereby giving our customer more time to prepare and refine their briefs.
At Cockle Legal Briefs, we will be with you through every step of the process, from setting up your documents in the Court’s format, to helping you implement edits to your brief, to the printing, binding, and timely filing of your brief. Don’t hesitate to call and schedule your next Supreme Court brief!