The Appellate Specialist: Pros and Cons

If you are reading this blog post, there is a very good chance that you are an appellate specialist–an attorney that primarily handles appeals. Three decades ago it was rare to hear of such a specialty area, at least for civil matters. Most trial attorneys simply followed their case through the appeal process if there was an appeal. But that has all changed, mostly for the better. Even so, there can be some downsides to a system that utilizes only appellate specialists for appeals.

Before the advent of the modern appellate specialist, there was one area that already used them: criminal appeals, at least on the prosecution side. The vast majority of states follow the model that prosecutors prosecute criminal matters at the trial level but that state attorney general offices handle any subsequent appeals of the case. As a result, attorney general offices have by necessity utilized appellate specialists for many years. Of course, that was not always the way it worked even in that system as there was a time when members of an attorney general’s staff simply had to handle the next appeal that walked in the door.

Many states now also utilize appeal specialists to represent criminal defendants on appeal. In North Carolina, for instance, there is an Appellate Defender with a twenty-attorney staff that represents indigent defendants on appeal.