The Importance of Following the Rules
I am constantly stressing to my appellate advocacy students the importance of not just excellent substance in their briefs, but also the importance of complying with the court’s technical rules. There is nothing more frustrating as a legal writing professor than reading a brief that makes great legal arguments, but is so poorly formatted that the substance is lost in the technical errors.
A few days ago one of my students sent me a post by Casey C. Sullivan on FindLaw’s Strategist Blog about an attorney in Indiana who requested permission to file a corrected Table of Contents and Table of Authorities in a case before the Court of Appeals of Indiana. The court granted the request, but directed that “[n]o substantive changes . . . be made to the Amended Appellant’s Brief.”
According to the court’s opinion the new Table of Contents represented “at best, an abject failure to understand the most basic requirements of appellate briefing.” The attorney expanded the one-page Table of Contents in her first brief to a whopping thirty-seven pages in the amended brief. The Table of Authorities was expanded from four to eleven pages. The court’s opinion contains a few snippets from both tables including this gem from the Table of Authorities:
Hirsch v. Merchants Nat’l Bank & Trust Co. of Indiana, 336 N.E.2d 833 (Ind. Ct. App. 1975) (providing eight percent interest in action for breach of lease). When the parties’ contract does not provide an interest rate; therefore, the statutory interest rate of eight percent is applicable. (cited in App. 75-76) [appearing on page] 12
Unfortunately for the attorney, not even the page number in this entry was correct, as page 12 of the brief contained no case citations at all and was actually part of the Statement of Facts. According to the court, “the Table of Authorities fail[ed] at its basic and only purpose of informing us of the cases cited in the brief and directing us to where in the brief a particular case is discussed.”
The attorney’s failure to follow the rules came at a steep price—the court disregarded the entirety of both Tables—proving once again that formatting matters!