Opposing counsel once called Chris Schandevel a "brief-writing ninja." He took it as a compliment. Years later, as he considered ways to add value to attorneys coming up behind him, Chris channeled that nickname into a side job: Brief-Writing Ninja, his training platform to help lawyers improve their writing skills. Why? Because good writing is good writing—whether you’re writing for a court or a high school essay. In this conversation with hosts Todd Smith and Jody Sanders, Chris shares practical tips such as replacing “moreover” with “and”; “nevertheless” with “even still”; and “accordingly” or “however” with “but.” The panel deliberates over questions that should concern any writer. Can you start a sentence with a conjunction? Should lawyers master “styles” in Word? Is Century Schoolbook a worthy font? Tune in for the answers.

Download Chris's Brief-Writing Ninja Legal Style Guide here.

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Welcome to the Texas

Appellate Law Podcast,

the show that takes you inside the

Texas and federal appellate systems.

Through conversations with judges, court

staff, top trial and appellate lawyers,

academics, and innovators,

we provide practical insights to help

you become a more effective advocate.

Whether you're handling

appeals or preparing for trial,

you'll discover strategies to sharpen

your arguments, innovate your practice,

and stay ahead of the latest

developments. And now here are your hosts,

Todd Smith and Jody Sanders.

Produced and powered by LawPods.

You're listening to the Texas

Appellate Law Podcast. I'm Todd Smith.

And I'm Jody Sanders.

Our guest today is Chris Schandevel.

Chris is senior counsel at the

Alliance Defending Freedom. Chris,

welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Todd. It's great to be

here. Thanks for having me on.

Well,

there may be some of our listeners and

watchers who already know who you are

because you've got a really

strong LinkedIn presence

and talk a lot about what

you're doing there, but in case

they haven't heard about you,

tell us a little bit about yourself

and how you came to be a lawyer.

Sure. So a little about myself

and how I came to be a lawyer.

You prefaced that by saying a

little bit, but as you know,

I'm an attorney and you asked me to

tell my life story coming to law.

I'll try to keep it to a reader's digest

version by attorney standards at least

for what that's worth.

We can do a red light, green light if

it helps. I can put one on my phone.

Oh, sure. Yeah, no.

As long as I get a yellow in

between to know when to speed up.

The practice of law is a time when it's

okay to speed up when you see a yellow

light, right? You're standing up a

lecture and doing an argument. So

I graduated law school in 2012 from

University of Virginia School of Law.

I did an appellate clerkship on the

Virginia Court of Appeals for a year and a

half after that. From there,

I went to the Office of the

Attorney General of Virginia,

took a job in the criminal appeal section.

I spent five years litigating criminal

appeals in that office before coming to

Alliance Defending Freedom where I am

now. I joined ADF's appellate team,

I think it's coming up on eight years

now that I've been on this team.

ADF had always kind of been the

dream of mine. We can get into that.

More of that if you'd like,

and kind of tell that story.

But ADF had been the dream that hadn't

worked out for a few years there,

mostly due to family

circumstances on my end,

but then got the encouragement to apply,

heard that there were openings

applied and came to ADF.

And I've been living the dream

for the past, like I said,

I think it's eight years now

litigating constitutional appeals,

mostly in the areas of religious

freedom, free exercise, pro- life work,

parental rights for the

past eight years now,

doing appeals in state and federal

appellate courts across the country,

including getting to work on

a few US Supreme Court cases,

which has been really fun.

Yeah. Well, so tell us

a little more about ADF.

It's not a law firm traditionally

is it? It doesn't sound like it.

So give us a little bit of the

history so we can put that in context.

Sure. So it's not a law firm in

the sense that it's not for profit.

We do call ourselves the biggest

Christian law firm litigating in the free

exercise, free speech, parental rights,

pro- life space. I think we've got,

and I'll get the number wrong, but

probably 60 attorneys on staff now,

somewhere in that range. So we're a

lot larger than a lot of folks realize.

We've been around for about 30 years now.

We started off as the Alliance Defense

Fund and we were just an organization,

basically a fundraising organization

that was helping to fund other

attorneys who were litigating cases in

the free speech or religious freedom

or pro- life spaces. Over time,

we started hiring our own attorneys

and switched from being kind of a

fundraising funding outfit to

being more like a law firm.

We're litigating our own cases from start

to finish. We've got clients that come

to us that have a need.

We're filing the lawsuit,

taking it up on appeal all the way to

the US Supreme Court if we need to.

We've got an entire

communication side of the house,

so we're litigating cases in the court

of republic opinion. At the same time,

we're litigating cases in court,

which has been a new and different

experience for me having come out of

government where at the line

attorney at a CDG's office,

you'd better not talk to anyone in

the press, right? That's not your job.

But here it is a big part of our job,

so that's been a fun new wrinkle.

But yeah, so we are just ADF stands

to keep the door open for the gospel

and also just to defend every person's

God-given right to hear and speak the

truth. So we're very intent on

protecting the rights of all of us,

people who agree with us,

people who don't agree with us,

the right to hear and speak the truth.

And also just making sure that we are not

just playing defense,

but that we are seeking to improve

our legal system for all Americans and

thinking about that in

terms of the long game,

what are some big generational

wins that'll make a difference,

make this country a better

place, not just for us,

but for our kids and for our grandkids.

Well,

you've already kind of dropped this

description in there about ADF being your

dream job. Tell us a little bit about

why or why you characterize it that way.

Sure. So it really started with what I

wanted to do and the type of cases that I

wanted to work on and how I

wanted to use a legal degree.

And then since coming here on top of that,

it's turned into also just realizing

the privilege it is to get to

work with the kind of people that

I work with on a daily basis,

whether that be colleagues,

whether that be clients.

And so it actually goes all the way

back to when I was in high school,

had done one well in school.

I was an oldest child and so

I had oldest child syndrome.

And so it was always about getting

straight A's, doing my best at school,

pleasing my parents and all of that.

And my mom and dad always told me,

"Christopher, we believe in you.

You can do anything that you set your

mind to with the gifts that God has given

to you and as long as you do it for

him and for his glory." And so in my

16-year-old self, I thought, well,

what are two really hard professions?

The two that I could think of were

medicine and law. And I

hate math and I hate blood,

but medicine kind of went out

the window. So I said, "Well,

I guess I'll pursue a career in

law." And as around that time,

I got a little bit more interested

in politics and seeing how

the legal system interacts with our

culture and how a lot of these issues that

affect our day-to-day rights,

our ability to speak out on issues that

are important to us are really being

decided by attorneys and

judges in courtrooms.

And so I realized that I could use a

degree as an attorney to do work that I

felt like not just was

important to me personally,

but work that I felt like as a Christian,

work that God had prepared for me to

do and I could go to sleep every night

thinking I've used the gifts that he's

given to me today to do his work. And so

I set ADF and religious freedom

as kind of the goal actually in

undergrad as a freshman and undergrad.

And it just so happened at that

time I was keeping a blog for a

class that I was taking. That

So blogs were new. And so all

the professors were like, "Oh,

you have to keep a blog.

It's this new thing." And so

no one was reading my blog,

just my classmates because they had to.

I decided to post a little kind of rant

about some of what I thought was wrong

with our legal system and some of the

cases that I thought had been decided the

wrong way and put it out into

the world on this blog post.

And within a few days I logged on and I

had a comment from someone I never heard

of and she told me what her name was

and she told me that she worked for

Alliance Defending Freedom and that she

was recruiting law students to join the

summer internship program

called the Blackstone

Fellowship and that if I decided

to go to law school, that I should

apply for that program. And again,

I had just weeks earlier

discovered ADF for the first time,

decided I wanted to do Blackstone and

then this message appears on a blog post

that I assumed 12 people in the world

were reading, most of them, my classmates.

So that felt like a God moment of

him affirming this is a path that I

will bless.

And so that turned into a friendship

with her and she became a mentor of mine

and kind of led me at each stage

of my career to where I am now.

Well,

it sounds like that was the right place

for you and where you were meant to be.

So I'm glad to hear that story.

When you were at the AG's

office or even at ADF,

did you ever do any first level trial

work or were you always focused on

appeals?

Yeah, it depends on what you count

as first level trial work, I guess.

So when I first came

aboard at the AG's office,

we actually weren't called

the criminal appeal section.

We were called the criminal

litigation section.

And the reason they called it that is

because our work was split fifty fifty

between doing criminal appeals and like

direct appeals and then also doing a

post-conviction litigation,

most of which was habeas.

So I did a fair amount of habeas

litigation in my time there.

I probably handled 60 or 70 habeas

cases. And so those were, I mean,

you get the habeas petition filed in the

state trial court and so you would be

filing trial level briefs.

I had a few hearings in front of

trial court judges where I got to,

I think I questioned a witness three times

or four times total in my time there.

So I wasn't doing a lot of it,

but I did get to dabble a litle

bit and I enjoyed it. Before that,

I spent a year in my

third year of law school.

I did a third year prosecution clinic.

And so I spent a year at least being in

the courtroom trying criminal cases and

kind of got a sense of what that

feels like on a day-to-day basis.

Does the Virginia Attorney

General's office do, I mean,

is it mostly like habeas when they're in

the trial court or do they actually do

some trial court prosecution work?

So the AG's office has a few sections

that they come in as like special

prosecutors and do some trial level

litigation on the criminal side.

The biggest example that I can give you

is they had a computer crime section

that would come in and prosecute

some of the child pornography cases,

for example.

So the cases that were really big and

really intense and needed a lot of

specialized expertise on those cases.

So we had some individual sections,

like I said, that did those

types of prosecutions.

But for the most part in

the section that I was in,

we were doing entirely

post-conviction litigation.

Well, what would you say it was

that sort of directed you toward

appellate litigation specifically over,

you didn't fall in love with being

a trial lawyer like some people do.

And we've talked many times on our show

about how people take different paths to

appellate practice,

but what was it about your experience

that really nudged you that direction and

made you think that that's

what you wanted to do?

Yeah, I think two things.

Part of it probably is personality and

then part of it is just the opportunity

that presented itself to me.

So on the personality side,

I like to be very careful and

thoughtful and methodical and never

put a statement out into the world unless

I've verified to myself that it's 100%

true to the best that I can.

And so the thing that I found most

unsettling about trial court work is that

there are so many different things,

issues that could come up in

the course of a single hearing,

a single bench trial,

legal issues that could be thrown

at you and objections and the like.

And my personality is such that I

have a hard time speaking confidently

when I haven't had the time to dig deep

into an issue and make sure that I know

that issue confidently.

Whereas with appeals,

you really get that time to go deep. You

know what the issues are going to be on

the appeal. It's narrowed quite a bit.

You have a pretty good sense of what

questions you might get oral argument.

So you can go into those hearings

with a lot more confidence.

Kind of a shorthand that I

used to describe the difference

as I have experienced

it myself is that at

the trial court level,

your knowledge base has to

be basically a mile wide.

There are a lot of different things and

issues that can come up that you have to

at least have some awareness

and understanding of,

but you can usually skate by with

it being just a few inches deep.

You don't have to know the

deep down details in and

out of every single possible

issue that might come up, maybe a few,

but broadly not usually as necessary.

On appeal,

it's almost the opposite where you can

usually get away with your knowledge base

being more like a few inches wide

because you know what the single specific

issues are that are coming up on appeal,

but you really need to be able to go a

mile deep in terms of understanding those

specific issues, understand the case law,

understanding first principles

that informs them and all

of that. So personality

wise,

I was a lot more comfortable doing that

kind of work and having time to really

think through my positions and my

arguments and what I had to inform them.

So that's on the personality side.

In terms of what pushed me

in that direction and gave

me the opportunity to get

into appeals,

I honestly went through law school

convinced that I would never do appeals

because the friends of mine who

were doing moot court and appellate

type work in law school were

friends who had done moot court and

speech and debate and all of those things

in college and in high school and I

had never done any of those things.

I had a friend who had Robert's rules

of order basically memorized and I had

never heard of that. I was like,

"Who is Robert and what is this?

" I convinced myself, "Well,

appellate work is for those guys and

It's not for me.

" And then when I got my clerkship and

started seeing appellate practice in real

life, I started thinking, "Oh,

maybe I could actually do this.

" And then when I took the

job of the AG's office,

it really hit me probably for the first

time standing up to do a moot court

before my first oral argument

that I felt a lot more natural and

comfortable doing it than I ever

expected. And people asked me,

"Why do you think that is?

Were you just born with the ability

to get up and talk and have these

conversations with people at a high

level?" I don't think that it's something

that necessarily came

just naturally to me.

What I think that it is that probably

influenced it the most I grew up,

like I said, a Christian home,

very committed parents and went to

church every Sunday and Wednesday,

twice on Sundays. And the church that

I attended growing up was really good

about getting young men opportunities

to get up, to do Bible studies,

to preach sermons, et cetera.

So I'd had a lot of public speaking

experience in my church and in

multiple churches that I attended

through college through law school.

So I was used to getting

up in front of an audience,

usually armed with a text from scripture,

usually with some points that I wanted

to make about how to best interpret that

text,

usually with a goal of talking about how

are we going to apply this older text

to a present day context And ready to

answer questions that I'm getting in

the moment from attendees

who maybe disagree with me,

aren't sure about my points and having

to get really good at steering them back

on track, making the

points that I want to make,

try to persuade them to interpret the

text the same way that I was interpreting

it. So when I got up into an

oral argument for the first time,

I realized I've done all

of this stuff before,

but before it was scripture and now it's

the statute and before it was lady in

the back row of the back pew who

had the hardest questions for me

and now it's a judge on an appellate

court. He's got tough questions for me.

And so I felt a lot more comfortable

than I ever would've guessed.

I never would've thought about

the similarities between that

background and I should

because my upbringing was not

dissimilar,

but I don't know that I've ever put

that together in my own mind about the

similarities just in that life experience

growing up as a young person in the

church environment to what it means to

be what you do as an appellate lawyer day

in and day out. So that's

really an interesting ...

I don't even know if I

would call it a parallel.

It was more like preparatory

experience or something.

Yeah, exactly.

And so what I tell people who are

interested in doing appellate work or

interested in becoming

attorney and attorney period,

they come to me looking for,

so what's your best advice?

What specific internships should I

get? What specific books should I read?

What specific groups should I join?

And one of my biggest pieces of advice

is just look for opportunities to do

public speaking.

And that just means getting up in front

of a group and hearing something in

front of that group. You don't

write it off because, oh,

it's not legal or it's not speech and

debate or whatever the case may be.

Just get comfortable presenting a point,

a topic in front of a group and just

do that as many times as you can.

It's really great experience even if

it's completely unrelated to the law.

Well, you've done it a lot

as an appellate lawyer.

I know from our previous communications

that you've done about 90 oral

arguments, which is kind of a staggering

number, especially someone ...

I think I can confidently say in my world,

you're still considered a young lawyer.

Right. I'll.

Take that.

And I'll leave it to Jody as to

whether he will agree with that or not.

Oh, definitely. Yeah.

But at this stage of your career,

it seems like that you have been given

an opportunity to just do a tremendous

amount of very important work on important

cases and stand up and represent your

clients in court. So I do want to talk

a little more about your practice,

just to kind of preface some other

things we're going to talk about,

aside from all those oral arguments,

you've got a lot of interesting

experience with some Supreme Court

representation. And the other thing

that I definitely want to cover,

I'm going to shift the planned order

of things a little bit. Your little,

I don't want to say little,

your side venture that you've got going

that I think will be of great interest

to the people who listen to our show.

It's still little. So you

can say little. That's okay.

We're just getting started.

And we'll get back to that, I promise.

But since we're talking

really about your practice,

this is kind of the setup for the second

part we're going to talk about. I mean,

90 oral arguments over what

period of time did that take

place?

Yeah, that's over the

course of about 12 years.

Wow, that is a lot. I mean, I'm

just like you, I'm no mathematician,

but you're doing seven, eight,

nine a year at that rate.

So that is very impressive.

I'll asterisk impressive. It's a lot.

The reality was it wasn't

because I was impressive.

It was because I was in a state AG's

office that had a certain number of

attorneys and a certain number of appeals

that had to be argued and they needed

bodies to do the arguments. So I tell

people newer attorneys looking for work,

especially looking to break

into the appellate space,

don't sleep on your state AG's offices,

whether it be an SGs section or like a

criminal appeals section like I found

there is a lot of interesting work to be

done in those offices and there's a lot

of work to go around.

So the joke I tell people that

it was true from my experience,

you go to a big law firm,

the reward for good work is a bonus or

a promotion or whatever the case may be.

You go to a government office and the

reward for good work tends to be more work

and I certainly experienced the

more work aspect of the job. I was

doing probably more than seven or eight

oral arguments a year at the time,

definitely doing double digits most years.

And the reason for that is because there

was just so much work to go around,

but it really does teach you a lot

of things in a short amount of time.

It teaches you the value of efficiency.

So balancing writing briefs,

each of those cases I argued,

I wrote an apples brief usually as

the Commonwealth, as the appellee,

so writing state court appeals,

state Supreme Court briefs.

And I'd have times when I would have

three or four merits appellate briefs due

in a single month. And so balancing

the timing of getting those written,

getting those filed. And then also on

top of that, filing all those briefs,

but then also having oral arguments

interspersed within those briefs that I'm

filing.

And the oral arguments are on cases

that I might have briefed seven or eight

briefs ago. So having to remember

back, okay, what was this appeal about?

What am I arguing? And so I also had to

get very good at figuring out how do I,

when I'm writing the brief for an appeal,

how do I prepare for the oral argument

at that same time that I'm writing a

brief? So when it comes time

to do the oral argument,

there's not a lot of extra prep,

extra work to do because

I just didn't have time.

I think I did two or three moot courts

in my time at the AG's office over like

70 something appeals because

we just didn't have time.

And so I would joke that my, I argued

14 cases in the Virginia Supreme Court.

I would joke that my moot court for the

state Supreme Court argument was the

court of appeals argument because

that's the only time I went through the

process of making the argument before

the state Supreme Court argument. There

are times most times I was prepping for

oral argument the day before the oral

argument, sometimes.

Afternoon before.

I can remember sitting in the back of

the Virginia Supreme Court courtroom,

one case in particular where I had just

been slammed and I am handwriting my

outline for my argument in court as

someone else is arguing because that's the

best that I had time to put into it.

You learn tricks in the briefwriting

process that will then serve you well when

you're doing the oral argument.

So for me, for example,

I annotated my record in hard copy,

I tabbed it, I highlighted it,

I took notes on it so that

when I walk into the courtroom,

I'm walking in with an annotated record

where everything's right in front of me.

I digitally highlighted every

case that I read in Westlaw.

I had a color coding system, I

had annotations in the margins.

So when it came time to prep for oral

argument, I could click print, print,

print, print, print, print, print,

and all those hard copies. Everything

is color coded already from when I wrote

the brief. I would save cases

for oral argument that say,

I put a note that says,

"Don't use this in the brief,

but remember to prep this

for oral argument in case

it comes up." All that stuff

would be filed away. So when it came

time for the day before the argument,

I'm frantically prepping,

it's a much quicker process.

I can get up to speed a lot more quickly

because I invested so much during the

briefwriting process.

Sure. Wow. Trying to imagine outlining

my argument sitting out in the gallery,

that would be-.

That was not the ideal. It was

not the ideal. I had another time,

I don't know if y'all have ever ...

Have either of you had to

argue two appeals in one day?

Yep.

I have not. Thankfully I.

Have.

Yes.

That is a stressful experience, Todd,

as I'm sure you can speak to. For me,

not only was it two appeals,

but they scheduled them back to back that

morning and I was the apple-lee in the

first case and I was the appellant in

the second case and the appellant in the

first case used up all its rebuttal time.

So I literally was up there for 15 minutes

as the applee, went back to my desk,

got my materials,

walked across the courtroom to the

other side without sitting down,

walked right back to the lecturer and

launched into my prepared opening remarks

in the next appeal.

I was terrified I was going

to start talking about the

previous case during that

argument,

but somehow I survived and we got wins

in both of those cases they came out.

The.

Same panel or different panel?

Yeah, so state Supreme Court,

so all the same justices.

And we just pretended like what I had

just been talking to them about two

minutes earlier never happened and

just launched right into the next one.

Wow. Yeah.

It's amazing when that happens and it

makes me think whether anyone inside the

court is thinking about ...

It happens to be that this Chandeville

guy is on both cases. Well, interesting.

Let's put them back to back.

Right.

Did they think they were doing me a

favor there or were they just messing.

With you? Yeah, they were saving you.

Travel time.

I don't.

Think so. Yeah. We'll let them

get back to the office earlier.

They have to park one

time. We'll be so grateful.

Well, that takes real skill to try to

keep all that stuff straight, for sure.

That's what a fascinating ...

Your overall experience is

just really interesting to me.

Something else that we've chatted about

a little is you've had quite a bit of

opportunity to either assist people

getting ready for US Supreme Court

arguments,

or you've actually had the privilege

of going and sitting at council table

during argument fairly recently.

And then I think the cases have been

decided if I remember correctly.

So let's talk a little bit about

how you got into that because

what a cool thing to get to do.

So how did that first Supreme

Court case find its way to your

desk that you got to work on?

Yeah. So going back to what I said

earlier about the benefit of working in a

government office that's a litle bit

understaffed That's basically how I got

that. I got to sit second, let's see,

third chair on a criminal case appeal

that went up to the US Supreme Court.

And the reason for that, the SG

section at the time was pretty small.

There was the SG and then he had a

couple of deputies underneath him.

So there was three total. That SG

ended up taking a position elsewhere,

which left only two attorneys in

that section and they got two cases

granted in the US Supreme Court at the

same time where they were the respondents

in both cases. Interestingly enough,

both cases originated in the same

state trial court in rural Virginia,

which I don't know how often the same

trial judge has two cases in the US

Supreme Court in the same term.

But.

It happened that way for that term.

And so they just needed help with the

research at the time I was still pretty

green.

So I was used more for research than I

was used for the briefwriting itself,

but got to help do the research.

It was a Fourth Amendment case,

so it was a fun constitutional

issue, got to help,

at least helped review the brief,

gave some feedback and then got to sit

in all the moots and then got to sit,

like I said, third chair oral argument,

which is probably when you're breaking in,

that's probably the best seat to sit in

because you don't have the pressure of

being the one who's arguing.

You also don't have the pressure of

sitting right next to the person arguing.

So what if they lean over mid-argument

and they need something from me and am I

going to have it ready for them or not?

I had someone,

a colleague in between me and the

person arguing so had a little bit of a

buffer. So I was just on

the end with a notebook,

just taking it in a council table.

I was a few feet away from some of the

justices because the bench and the tables

are so close.

And so it was just a really

neat experience to get to

see just the highest level

of oral advocacy and how

engaged the justices are and

get to be a part of all of

that.

Now it was a criminal case and it was

a Fourth Amendment case and the officer

probably should have gotten a warrant.

He definitely would have had

time to have gotten a warrant,

did not get a warrant. We

lost that case eight to one.

So we lost pretty handily on

that fourth amendment case,

but still just a really fun,

really neat experience. That was my one

experience at the Supreme Court in the

Virginia AG's office. When I came to

ADF, ADF is at the US Supreme Court.

Recently it's been we've had one or two

cases at the Supreme Court every term.

This term we actually have four cases

at the US Supreme Court and being on the

appellate team, we've got I think

five or six attorneys on the team.

And so when you have that many

cases that could grant it,

you get a lot of opportunities

to work on Supreme Court cases.

So I have helped write three cert

petitions that have been granted.

I helped with the briefing on I think

five merits cases after them being

granted, sat at council

table second chair once.

So I joked that I started a third chair

and then I moved my way to second chair

and I'm hoping to eventually bump off

whoever's already going to get to take

over the lecture in one of these days,

Lord willing. And then I've been able to

participate in oral argument prep with

the attorneys that are arguing

sitting second or third chair.

Even cases that I haven't

been at council table,

I've gotten to camp out in that war room.

We set up at our office or

at a hotel for three, four,

five days ahead of the oral argument

and we just put the attorney arguing

through mood after mood after mood

after mood And we're all in there just

putting our heads together,

trying to make things as miserable as

we can on them so that ideally when they

get up and do their oral argument,

it'll feel like a breeze,

a walk in the park compared to what we

put them through during the moot process.

So are you now subjected to moots

now that you're in this position?

I have been.

Be quite a bit different from your

experience at the AG's office.

Yes. So coming to ADF,

we try to do three moots before

every appellate argument.

And so we do two internal moots and one

external moot where we bring in judges

from outside of ADF who are

more cold with the case.

They're not necessarily

true believers like we are.

They might be more skeptical

of our positions. And so yes,

I have been on the receiving end of a

good number of moots and it's not as fun

to be on the receiving end. I like to be

one of the judges and to be giving it.

I tell people raising a Christian home,

I always taught you always have to be

nice and I've done my best to be a nice

person throughout all of my life,

but that's why I love acting.

I always want to be the bad guy and I

love mooding because it's the one time

when it's helpful to be mean and it's

allowed because you're in character

as a moot court judge. So I enjoy

the moot court process very much.

Well, with all your oral

argument experience,

what do you think separates a

good argument from one that really

goes very well in your mind?

Yeah, I think a couple things.

One is just preparation.

I talked about the lack of time that I

had for preparation before the argument.

I was at the AG's office,

but really the point of that was I

made time to do the preparation I

needed to do and I just had to do it at

the same time I was writing the brief,

but I was still spending

a lot of time preparing.

And so I learned that record

like the back of my hand.

I knew my cases frontwards and backwards.

And when you walk into an argument and

you have been through every case cited in

the briefs, you've read through

the briefs multiple times,

you have responses that you've come up

with to potential questions that you

might get. I'm not a fan

of scripting arguments.

I might script my first couple of

sentences and I might script my outro,

my final few sentences that I

want to get out before I sit down,

but I try very hard not to script

and I try very hard not to write out,

not to commit to an outline too far in

advance of the argument. I do tend to

write my outline for the argument of the

points I hope to cover even still when

I have more time to prepare.

I write those the day before,

sometimes the night before,

because I'm instead spending all of

my time getting as familiar as I can

possibly be with the trial court record,

with the cases that are issued on appeal,

with a hope being that when

I go to write my outline,

everything that's in my head just kind

of spills out of the page as I'm writing

it. And then when I get to the lectern,

I'm really not looking

down and using the outline.

It's just I've crammed so much

information in my head that I can have a

conversation with the justices or the

judges regardless of which direction they

want to take it.

I guess that was the second point that

I meant to get to earlier. An argument

that goes exceptionally well is one that

is a conversation with the judges from

start to finish. So it's not someone

getting up and trying to give a speech.

It's not someone getting up and trying

to dodge hard questions so they can make

the points that they want to make.

I tell people hard questions are your

friends, hostile

questions are your friend.

That's the judge telling you exactly what

the problem is that she has with your

case and giving you an opportunity to

speak to that and hopefully persuade her.

So I've heard advocates come out of

an oral argument and I Heard one guy

bragging about, "Oh, did you see

how I dodged all those questions?

I didn't answer any of them. I just

made points out. " And I thought,

what a shame. For you and wasted

opportunity. Yeah, wasted opportunities,

wasting the judges' time.

And you can see when the judges realize

they're not going to get anything

helpful out of the advocate and they

just kind of stop asking questions and

that's when you know you've

missed an opportunity.

Yeah, for sure. So what do you

take to the lecturer with you?

So I take ... Let me see if I have

got a copy, an example with me.

I mean, I take a giant binder

with me and it's typically ...

We'll pretend like this is

from maybe a smaller appeal,

but I've got the briefs in that binder.

I've got cases that I think I might

be asked about in that binder.

If it's a small record, I might

have my record in that binder.

If it's a larger record,

if there's a ton of cases,

I'll do a separate binder for the

record, a separate binder for the cases.

Those will usually stay at council

table if it's within reach.

I might bring it all up and stick those

on the shelf underneath the main lectern

just to have them within arm's

reach if I need them. It's usually

95% of the time it's

just a security blanket.

It's just I know that it's there if I

need it and that is helpful to me. The

proces of building those binders

is really where the learning comes.

From.

Me, relearning my record in my cases.

But there is the 5% of times where I'll

be sitting at the appellate's table and

the appellant will get a question from

one of the judges about a case and the

appellant's counsel will quote something

or say something about the case and

having a binder with all the cases in

it that I've annotated myself and it's

color coded and I know where stuff is

at and then I can flip it open and find

exactly the point that I need to respond

to the point that the counsel just

made. I can stand up and sometimes

if it's a short enough point,

I can read the exact quote to the judges.

I found that to be a really powerful way

to use the case law and shows the value

of being prepared and having

the materials with you.

I do the same thing. I take a lot

of printed out paper cases with me,

kind of organized in the way

that I need them just in case.

And it comes up quite a bit, it seems.

Yep.

Yeah, you never know.

In all your preparation,

you're probably not going to remember

the exact language of a specific case on

an issue, but having it right

there with you is helpful.

Right. Or I'll know,

I'll remember roughly where on the page

in the case that I read the point that I

need is located,

but I won't remember exactly what it

said or how it's phrased with exact

context. And so I can quickly find

it if I've got it with me. But yeah,

if I were just relying on memory,

it wouldn't be nearly as effective.

Well,

we could spend the rest of our time

talking about oral argument because it's I

think something that all three of

us think is extremely important.

And dare I say even passionate about

aside from your oral argument experience,

which again is just tremendous.

And one reason why I wanted to ask you

on the podcast was to talk about your

latest, we'll call it the

side venture, I guess,

and it's called Briefwriting Ninja.

I mentioned you being on LinkedIn earlier

and that's where I got to know you and

was first exposed to you because you're

always providing all these great legal

writing tips. And next thing I know,

I look up and you've made

this announcement that you've

actually formalized what

you were already calling briefwriting

Ninja and now you've kind of launched it

and you're doing things like providing

training to law firms and things like

that.

So tell us first,

how did you come up with the idea to even

do this and then tell us about what's

going on with Briefwriting Ninja

and where you see it going.

Yeah, thanks. I'd love to. So again,

it was more being in the right place

at the right time than anything that I

intentionally set out to do myself.

The name Briefwriting Ninja,

it sounds maybe a little bit corny,

but it's actually a nickname that

opposing counsel gave me and an

appeal that we were working on

back when I was in the AG's office.

So I was working on a Commonwealth's

appeal where the government,

we were appealing a suppression

ruling or something,

kind of limited circumstances where the

government was allowed to appeal a trial

court ruling in a criminal case. And I

read my opening brief and I come up with,

I thought a pretty clever theory for

getting the lower court reversed and got a

call from opposing counsel during the

time that he was writing his brief and he

called to talk about something procedural.

But he said,

"Just kind of speaking

off the record here,

and maybe I shouldn't preface what I'm

about to tell the world with him saying

it was off the record." I don't think

he said off the record, but he said,

"I'll just be honest with you.

I was talking to a colleague the

other day and I told him, man,

that's Chris guy. He's

like a brief writing ninja.

I don't know how to respond to some

of these arguments he's making.

He hasn't left me with anything that I

can really say effectively." And so that

was a fun moment and it became my

favorite professional compliment I've ever

gotten and went in my file and I kind

of just tucked it away and it's a neat

memory. And then a few years ago when I

started getting more active on LinkedIn,

I looked around and thought, well, how

can I engage with people? How can I

add value to attorneys who are coming

up behind me in the profession?

And I've always been passionate about

good writing and it's a topic that I've

studied a good amount and

I thought, okay, well,

maybe I can put some legal writing tips

out into the world and see if that's

something that people will

benefit from and enjoy.

And I noticed at the time that hashtags

were really big on LinkedIn and if you

wanted to do something consistently,

it was good to have a hashtag that you

used for every post that you did on that

topic.

And so I brainstormed and tried to figure

out what unique hashtag can I come up

with.

And the one that kept coming back was

Briefwriting Ninja because that was that

favorite professional compliment that

I had gotten several years earlier.

So I started sticking that hashtag on

my posts and it was corny and my wife

made fun of me for it, but it was okay.

I was like,

"It's fun." I take my work very seriously.

I try hard not to take

myself too seriously.

And so that was just a good natured way

of putting a label on what I was doing.

And like you said, things kind of

took off in a way that surprised me.

I posted this style guide that I'd put

together for my own use and put down to

the world and it went viral a

couple times. And before I knew it,

I had law firms that were coming

to me in my inbox and saying, "Hey,

is there any chance you could

come do a seminar for our firm?

We'll pay you for it. " And I thought,

sure, my wife has been telling me,

"If there's some way you can make

money off of all this time you spend on

LinkedIn, that would be really

helpful." So I was like, "Look, honey,

I might be able to. " And so I did

a couple of those for law firms.

I started doing similar

trainings in- house for ADF.

I had some teams that asked me to do

those trainings in- house and got really

good feedback from everyone that I had

done them for and I really enjoy teaching

and I really enjoyed legal writing.

And so I thought if I'm going

to have people coming to me,

maybe I ought to make this a litle

bit more official, start an LLC,

them paying me easier for them

and taxes easier and all of that.

So it was really just kind of supply and

demand and the demand kind of came to

me and that's how it was born.

The opportunity just showed up on your

doorstep after putting yourself out there

on LinkedIn it sounds like.

Exactly.

The magic of Hashtag. Yeah, and

hashtags. T's pretty awesome.

And had.

Tags.

And although hashtags are

out of style now on LinkedIn.

So I don't know that it would work

quite as well as it did for me then,

but they were big back then.

Well, you've kind of got your

testing ground with ADF, right?

You can come up with your curriculum,

train the lawyers there in house,

test ideas out on them and

depending on your feedback,

what a great sort of market test you

have available to you right there and

it benefits ADF, it benefits the

client. So it's a great thing to do.

It's amazing that you hear stories like

this where you start something that's

not really intentional,

kind of like you didn't intend it to be

a business opportunity really when you

first started doing it, but it kind

of becomes one thing you're known for.

And I think it's really interesting that

it's really kind of taken off on you.

You mentioned your style guide and we're

going to make this available to our

listeners in.

The.

Show notes and for download.

I told you before we started recording

when I was setting up some templates for

my practice,

I put it on my desk and went through it

item by item and I agreed with most of

what you said, Chris, although there's

some things I want to ask you about.

Yeah, let's fight it out

right here, bring it on.

No, well, we'll go through that.

So let's see. Yeah, I mean,

I could literally go through bullet point

by bullet point and ask you questions

about this. I'm not sure we're

going to have time to do that.

So I guess let me ask a loaded question

and this maybe help kick off the

discussion on this, but

what do you think in your

three page style guide, which covers a

lot of ground? You covered formatting,

a style and tone, structure, paragraphs,

quotations, citations, sentences,

words, and punctuation. I mean,

that's the waterfront of legal.

Writing, right? Right. It's everything.

What do you think is the single most

important guide point in this guide

that you would emphasize to someone

who does what we do for a living?

Yeah, it's a great question.

I've got five kids.

It's kind of like asking me

to pick my favorite child.

I love so many of these tips and I preach

all of them so that's therein lies the

challenge and singling out just one.

I think the one that I would

highlight in terms of easiest to

implement and also most bang for your

buck in terms of improving your legal

writing is my tip about starting

more sentences with sentence starting

conjunctions. And so those three

being specifically and but and so.

We attorneys get convinced that legal

writing is just a different animal from

most writing and so we get to law school

and we have to unlearn everything that

we've ever been taught about good writing

and suddenly we have to start writing

with words like here too for and

accordingly and wherefore and herein

and nevertheless, and

et cetera, et cetera.

But the reality is good writing

is good writing, period.

Whether you're writing for

a court, whether you're

writing a high school essay,

whether you're writing

for the general public.

And so one thing that I've noticed in a

lot of legal writing is those transition

words between sentences we tend to make

those transition words very clunky.

So we love words like

accordingly and nonetheless. And

even however, it's not a long word,

but it's a three syllable word.

So it's clunky when you start

a sentence with, however,

and then you go on to make the point.

And so I think the vast majority of

legal writing could be improved if

attorneys would basically triple the

number of sentence starting conjunctions

that they're using in their briefs. So

instead of saying moreover, just say and.

Instead of saying nevertheless,

just say even still.

Instead of saying accordingly and however,

just say but. Start

this sentence with but.

It makes for punchier writing.

It also honestly makes for clearer

writing and you might not think that.

You might think, oh,

everyone knows accordingly

roughly means like so or and,

but it's so long and clunky that even

if you're slowing down the reader a

millisecond,

you can avoid that by just saying and or

just saying so or just saying but words

that are immediately clear what they mean.

And so that's my biggest one.

Most attorneys don't do it.

I think because a lot of us

were taught in grade school,

you're not allowed to start a sentence

with a sentence starting conjunction.

I still get English teachers

on my LinkedIn comments

who fight with me and say,

"I'm violating some basic rule of

grammar and I have to tell them, no,

that's not a rule,

that's a myth, Read any good

fiction." And I think it's because

when you're a kid and you're starting to

learn how to write for the first time,

the temptation is to,

if you're writing a story and then my

mom did this and then my brother did this

and then we went to the store and then

every sentence starts with an and.

And so the teachers have to be like,

"Stop starting every sentence with and.

" And so we get in our head that we

can't start a sentence with an and or a

butter.

But the reality is that's just not

a real rule and the best writers for

centuries have done it.

I think I've seen it more than

I used to. 20, 25 years ago,

it went against nature for me to do that,

to use sentence starting conjunctions.

But now I've grown to

where I really like it.

And for a lot of the reasons you describe,

it's much planner and

easier to understand.

You're not injecting in necessary

syllables or interrupting the flow of your

sentences. It just

reads better. I'm a fan.

I've been converted. It didn't take

very much for me to get converted.

So you talk about formatting,

maybe we'll hit a couple

of formatting points here.

And the one I think that struck

me the most in your guide, I mean,

I agree with just almost everything

you say in here and a lot of it,

you wisely direct people

to learn styles in let's just say

Microsoft Word because that's what

most of us use, right?

Right. Yep.

It's amazing. I still see law firms

who don't know what that even is.

And when you are in my

role and in Jody's role,

a lot of times we're working with lawyers

from other firms who send us stuff on

their original template and.

The format. Merging.

The formatting.

My EOCD brain just kicks in

and I just can't even read it.

It's just awful.

You should almost never use a tab when

you're writing a legal document, right?

Your styles should be pre-formatted.

And you give a lot of good tips in

here on how to style things. As I said,

I adopted a lot of this when I was

creating my basic brief template.

The one thing I want to quiz you

on a little bit, first of all,

I agree with using Century School

Book. That is my font of choice.

Good.

Isn't that still what the US Supremes use?

It's still what the

Supreme Court uses, right?

So it's good enough for the US Supreme

Court. It's good enough for me. Jody,

are you 343? Are you on board

with Century School book?

We use a variety and it depends. I have

used it before. That's one of the ones.

I mean, there's a bunch of

different ones that we use.

But the thing that almost said

triggered me, it really didn't,

but the thing that caught my attention

was your idea of aligning left.

Yes.

And you probably get some

pushback on that, don't you?

Absolutely. No,

I was the one giving the pushback

when I first had to make this switch.

So I.

Can relate to the pushback.

So I think we see a lot of full

justification in legal writing

and documents and that visually,

but that's kind of appealing because

you're sort of boxed into a specific zone

in the document.

I looked at that when I was setting

up my styles and I was like, "Yeah,

I just don't know that I can do that

because what you get is that jagged right

edge, right?" But I know the flip side,

and you'd probably say this is

the next thing that we talk about,

but the flip side is

your spacing is uniform.

And so the words all look

the same on the page,

it's just a matter of

that jagged right edge.

So you used to be the one

giving the pushback you said.

What made you change your mind?

Mostly my boss told me that I had to

change to a different formatting and that

made me change my mind, right?

But in terms of what persuaded me,

I have been persuaded.

I'm a full convert to left a line

now and it's a couple things.

My initial pushback was fully justified

on both sides. It just looks clean,

like you said. You've got.

A.

Clean edge on the left, you got

the clean edge on the right.

Just looking at it on

the page, it looks nice.

The other side of that coin

though, like you mentioned,

is once you get to actually

reading the sentences themselves,

you see that in order to get those

clean lines on the left and the right,

some of the lines get stretched out

quite a bit and you've got the large gaps

between words and some lines and then

the next line you won't have those gaps

because they're not, that line isn't

needing to be stretched out as much.

And the result can be what's called

a river of white space where if.

You.

Get those spaces to line up down the page,

your eyes as you're reading through the

text get distracted by just the river of

white space kind of falling down the page.

And it's something I did notice back

the AG's office quite a bit where

everything that we wrote in red

was pretty much fully justified.

So you avoid the spacing issues.

The other thing that persuaded me though

with left aligned is that you actually,

you want a little bit of a jagged

right edge because it makes the brief

easier to read.

And the reason for that is because it's

easier for the reader's eyes to keep

track of where they're at and

moving from one line to the next.

If every line looks the same at the edge,

it's easy for the eyes to

lose which line was I on.

But if you've got a marker of, okay,

it was this line that was this long,

you can find the next line a little bit

easier. It's not a huge difference I

don't think,

but every little bit I think counts

when it comes to making briefs more

readable.

I will say that my bigger point

that I'm really intent on whether

you fully justify or left a line,

I'm less of a stickler on that because

I can see that the position for fully

justified. Regardless

of what you're doing,

you need to be using optional hyphens.

And the reason that they're optional,

that doesn't mean you turn on hyphenation

and you let the word processor choose

when it's going to hyphenate your words

at the end of the page because then you

get all sorts of crazy funky hyphens that

just end up distracting you more than

if you hadn't been using it.

But an optional hyphen is when you have

a huge gap because you're using fully

justified or you have a overly

jagged right edge because you've

got just a really long word that's

falling down onto the next line and you do

get that ugly look that you're mentioning,

Todd. You insert an optional

hyphen between syllables

to break up that word and

you bump part of it back up on the prior

line and allow part of it to spill over

onto the next line. And one,

it cleans up the gaps if you're fully

justified or it cleans up the gaps on the

right side if you're using

left align. And then two,

the beautiful thing

about an optional hyphen,

since you're not inserting

our hard hyphen, that's

going to stay no matter what.

So an optional hyphen I think is

control alt hyphen if I'm remembering my

shortcuts correctly.

The reason it's called optional is

because when it's no longer needed,

it disappears.

So if you're adding words before that

word that was breaking across lines and

then it ends up just naturally getting

entirely bumped to the next line,

a hyphen just drops out by itself. So

you don't run the risk of filing a brief

with an awkward hyphen in the middle

of a word where you didn't need it.

It comes and goes as needed. Oh.

That's cool.

Well,

I was going to ask you if my solution of

turning on hyphenation was acceptable.

Yeah,

my concern is that you end up in order

to avoid the distracting big edges

or the distracting gaps between words,

you end up hyphenating almost every

word that comes at the end of a line and

then there's just so many hyphens that

you've got like worse distraction than

what you started with.

Well, you're going to make me

reconsider and reevaluate my design.

The optional hyphen thing,

I remember I saw it in here.

It's mentioned in the guide and that

seemed like maybe a little farther than I

was initially inclined to go.

But you've persuaded me that I need to

at least give it a fresh look and see,

because I like the idea of the optional

hyphen that takes care of it when it's

just too much of a space,

but it drops off as you

said when it's not needed.

Right.

I wanted to.

Ask you about- I wish we had time to

go through all of these, but we don't.

Well,

I do want to ask you about one just

because it's one that I don't hear people

talk about and I'm just curious if

you'll explain it a little more.

True double spacing.

So true double spacing,

you might think that if you turn on the

double space setting in Microsoft Word,

it would double space your

briefs for you. You'd be wrong.

It adds an extra 15% of white space

between lines. So it's not exactly double,

it's double plus 15%. And

that additional white space,

the thinking is the more space you add

between lines, the looser it gets. Again,

it makes it harder on the reader

to track from one line to the next.

So a guy named Matthew Butterick,

who wrote typography for lawyers,

y'all probably both know who he is,

he advocates for using true double

spacing or exact double spacing.

And the way that you turn

it on is in Microsoft Word,

instead of clicking the default double

space option in your paragraph settings,

you change it to exactly and then whatever

two times the size of the font that

you're using, 14 point font,

it's exactly 28 spacing. You get lines

that are just a little bit tighter

together, which just again

makes it more readable,

moving from one line to the next.

I do throw in a word of caution that if

you're in a jurisdiction that operates

based on a page limit

instead of a word count,

you can create the impression that you're

trying to cheat the page limit if the

judge or the clerk's office doesn't know

what you're doing and why you're doing

it. So out of an abundance of caution,

I tend to call clerk's offices if they're

using a page count instead of a word

limit and I'll just ask like, "Hey,

this is the way that I space my briefs.

Is there any unwritten rule

against that I should know about?

" Even if I'm the appellant in an appeal,

I'll reach out to opposing counsel

beforehand and just say, "Hey,

this is how I plan to space my briefs."

You're welcome to space them the same

way.

That way we're all on equal footing.

No one thinks I'm trying

to get an advantage by

squeezing in more lines on the

page. And so far,

I've never run into a problem and I do

think it makes the briefs more readable.

Yeah. I'm glad you asked that, Jody,

because I really didn't understand that

too well when I looked at it the first

time and now you've given a

good explanation for it, Chris.

I thought of interest,

the last bullet point in that formatting

section you talk about preventing runts

or short lines and I am completely on

board with that because there's nothing I

hate worse than one word carrying over

to the next line of a paragraph and

you've got all that white space and I

will revise the paragraph until that

runt is gone because I just

can't stand the look of it.

Same.

But I'm glad that you've

given a description for what

I otherwise didn't have a

description for rights or short.

Lines. And I had to Google

it to get that description.

I didn't realize that someone called it

a runt, but that's what they're called.

And not only the aesthetics of it,

and I do think aesthetics matter because

it's all about building credibility

with the court.

And so if you show that

you are intentional about

even the smallest things,

that increases the likelihood that

a judge is going to think, okay,

this is someone who's

intentional about the big things.

This is someone that

care about the details,

so I'm going to be able to trust

them on the bigger stuff as well.

And it's not just aesthetics, it's also

there's a psychological effect, I think.

If you see a giant paragraph on a page

and at the very bottom of that paragraph,

there's a single word that spilled

down to the next line. At least to me,

that paragraph looks like it's about

to tip over and come crashing down,

right? It's like a giant Jenga

block with one lowly block at the

bottom all the way in the far left.

And so it just looks unsettled.

And so if you can bump that word back up

onto the previous line and have a very

nice, smooth, solid

landing for that paragraph,

it makes the writing and the argument

feel a lot more grounded and concrete and

solid as well.

Yeah. You mentioned in here also the

orphan and widow control. I mean,

that's an internal setting and word

definitely needs to be turned on keeping

lines together. Those are all great,

great points that we won't get into the

details of because I think it's again,

it goes hand in hand with

setting up your styles in Word,

but just having those settings

on will go a long way.

Yeah. Can I tell you though,

on the orphan widow control,

I don't know how much

you, if you've noticed it,

I'm a bit of an extremist on

orphan widow control. So for me,

very basic formatting is you don't want

a single line to bump over onto the

next paragraph or you don't want

a single line onto the next page.

You don't want a single line from the

start of a paragraph to be the last line

on the page and that just looks gross.

And so Orphan Widow control prevents that.

At least you have two lines

that are stranded at the

top or the bottom of a page

instead of just one. To

me, that still looks gross.

And when you're reading a brief,

whether it's hard copy or digitally,

you have to keep that thought

in your head as the reader,

as you flip from one page to the next,

as you scroll past the

white space on your iPad,

getting from one page to the next.

And so my ideal formatting is kind of like

orphan widow control on steroids,

which is ideally you should end the

complete paragraph at the bottom of each

page and start a brand new paragraph at

the top of the page so you don't have a

paragraph splitting in half over two

pages. The nice thing about that,

it's about making the brief as easy

to digest on the reader as possible

because the reader can read a page and

then answer a text message or get up and

make a sandwich or do whatever the judge

or law clerk might need to do as we're

constantly getting interrupted and then

pick the next page up and find exactly

where they were,

not have to keep that thought in their

heads in between that from one page to

the next. And so it's something

that I strive to do in every ...

I will file a 50 or 60 page brief and

if you go through and count the page

breaks that are not

clean like I described,

I've managed to get it down sometimes

to three or four places where I have a

paragraph spilling over

from one page to the next,

but otherwise clean breaks.

It takes a lot of extra effort, but again,

it's about making things as easy

to read on the reader as possible.

No, I hadn't quite heard that

one expressed that way before,

so that's super interesting.

So style and tone,

the main thing I wanted to ask you about

here, well, first of all, I'll mention,

you mentioned Matthew Butrick. He

was an early podcast guest of ours.

Excellent.

We're Butterick fans also,

but the next thing that's flagged for me

under style and tone is you talk about

Briefcatch and I'm a Guberman

fan, Ross Guberman fan.

And actually if he ever hears this,

I want to plant the seed for him to come

on the show to talk about what they're

doing at Briefcatch because it's

really pretty great right now.

You talk about when the draft is complete

to run Briefcatch on it's for anybody

who doesn't know it's software

that basically will ...

They're going through some changes

right now with the Word rake.

They acquired WordRake. So I'm still.

Trying.

To get used to how Briefcatch

is Briefcatch Plus works.

But I've found that it's really a great

service and certainly well worth the

money that you pay for it because

it will check your citations,

your abbreviations in your

citations. It will check your ...

It's not like grammarly exactly,

but it will make suggestions

and it's based on Ross's ...

I heard an interview with him recently

where he basically said they hard coded

in all of these examples of

exemplary legal writing and.

They.

Managed to basically turn that into

through the use of AI

it will call out the things that it

thinks can be improved and we'll give you

examples of how to say it

better and cite to say Scalia

or one of the other US

Supreme Court justices,

which tends to be sort of his bias

for what good legal writing is.

So totally on board with Briefcatch.

Did you have anything to add to that?

Yeah, I'm a huge fan too.

It's basically like having

Ross Guberman as your editor,

but he just lives in Microsoft

Word. And so you write the brief,

you click the button and then he gives

you all of his edits with examples for

why they're edits worth making.

You just go through, click through.

I accept most of them, but then there

may be occasional one where you ...

Usually I wouldn't use the

word clearly in a brief,

but if you're operating under

a clearly erroneous standard,

you have to say that word.

Sometimes you have to reject a

word for those sorts of reasons.

But for the most part,

it's fantastic. The advice,

the editing tips are fantastic and

always takes what I feel like is a pretty

good, pretty well written brief

and it just takes it up a notch.

Yeah. I think we all three agree on

that because I do love having it too.

It's always sort of my final check

before I get it ready to file.

Well, that's it.

What I'm going to do now is I'm going to

send Ross a clip of this conversation.

Yeah, I would love to have him back.

Yeah, he's fantastic. He's doing really,

really great interesting work with

the AI now and his reality checker

where it'll check to make sure you haven't

had those fake cases creep into the

briefs that you're filing attorneys

keep getting in trouble for.

And not just that,

I think the fake cases that have been

cited and briefs obviously are horrible,

but to me it's less a sign of the risk

of AI and more just a sign of the risk of

not careful lawyering And that's

something that's been a problem long

before AI came around.

And so the nice thing about Ros's reality

check is that not only does it check

to make sure the cases aren't fake,

it also makes sure to check that the

propositions that you're citing cases for

are accurate and come

from the cases themselves.

And that's often not an AI problem.

It's just a problem of

attorneys stretching cases

and holdings and rulings to

fit and say what they want them to say.

And so his software does the job that

a law clerk or a judge is going to be

doing when they look behind your writing

to make sure that you're being careful

and you're being accurate

with the cases you're citing.

So it just adds a ton of value.

We would need at least another hour to

go through all the things that I could

talk about in the guide.

There's really two other things I wanted

to bring up just because I think these

are useful things to talk about.

One is directly tied to what you were

just talking about AI. It seems like

the MDASH rather has kind

of become stigmatized by AI.

I'm not going to give it up. I

don't care what anybody says,

but do you have any feelings on that?

I know you're generally an advocate

of proper use of the NDASH. Well,

let's make sure I'm talking about

the right thing though because- No.

You've got it.

The MDASH is the longer one

that AI has been using and the N

dash is the shorter one

that you use in page ranges.

Right, right. No, and I

may say the wrong one,

but I know in my head what I mean.

Yeah. Just remember, and the letter M

is a litle bit wider than the letter N,

so the M dash is the wider

of the two. Yeah, no,

I'm a huge advocate of using M dashes in

briefs both to set off parentheticals,

especially when you have a long sentence

and you want to make it clearer and

less complicated. If you have more

than two commas in a sentence,

it's going to start to get unwieldy and

complicated because you lose track of,

okay, which comma goes with which other

comma and where are the clauses here?

So anytime I have commas already in

a sentence, I start thinking about,

can I change some of these

extra commas into M dashes?

So it's clear where the clauses are are.

And then also using them at the end

of a sentence to emphasize a point.

Basically it slows the reader down and

then you kind of hit them with a boom at

the end of that sentence after that MDash.

So I use them to add emphasis as

well. I know that there are

people out there who say, "Well,

now that AI uses MDash as so much,

we should stop using M Dashes because

we don't want people to think that we're

writing like AI writes." The reality is

AI is just using them because they're

good tools for good writing.

And so I think that mindset is

basically one that says, "Well,

if AI can write well,

I don't want to be confused with AI so

I'm going to start writing horribly."

Make my writing worse to.

Prove I'm.

Not AI. Exactly. Exactly. So cutting off

your nose to spite your face basically.

The machines will have to pry my M

dashes from my cold dead hands is

basically my position on that.

Yep.

I think we're in agreement on that

for sure. All right. But real quickly,

since we talked about N dashes,

that's one thing I have not been able

to get on board with is swapping out

hyphens for page ranges for end

dashes. I just think it looks weird.

It looks like you're trying

too hard. Maybe. I don't know.

I've seen it both ways.

I've seen people who agree that

maybe it should be an end dash,

but just you can kind of have the

viewpoint that I do where it's like,

I just can't go there.

Yeah.

Change my mind.

Yeah. So I don't know if I'll change

your mind. I will say in your defense,

I think the blue book allows either.

So there's not a one right or wrong.

I'll also say that using

hyphens between ranges

treats the two numbers as one word.

So you save on your word count if you're

hyphenating instead of using endashes.

So that's a helpful tip for people who

are up against the word count often.

For me,

the biggest reason to use the end dash

is because sometimes you have to use a

hyphen in a record number or

elsewhere in a citation. And

if you're using hyphens in a record

number and then also using a hyphen

in the page range,

it can sometimes be a little bit confusing

looking at the citation to figure

out, okay,

where are my page ranges in here and

what's just a different part of the

citation? And so there are times when

it adds some clarity to know that you're

always going to use an in dash between

the page ranges because it's easier to

tell what in the citation is a page range.

Now that's a very small minuscule

point that doesn't come up a whole lot,

but it's what slightly tips me over

the edge to use the end dash over the

hyphen.

All right. I think the

last substantive question,

because we're out of time and we're so

grateful that you've spent the time with

us today. Happy.

To do it.

We can't end the podcast on the

difference between hyphens and end dashes,

can we?

Oh no,

I have one that maybe will spark a little

more discussion and then Jody's going

to ask you for your tip reward story. But

under the quotations and

citations part of your guide,

I've noticed you do talk about minimizing

the use of brackets and ellipsis

and internal quotations and those

sorts of things, footnote references,

all the things that we were taught to

include to be true to the actual site.

And now the brilliant law students at

Harvard Law School have decided that we

can use the phrase citation modified and

there's a little laundry list of things

that that allows us to do if I

understand that rule correctly.

I assume like the last brief I wrote,

I actually went back and looked, okay,

do I have any ellipsis in here? And I did

and I thought about it and I was like,

I don't need that.

I can use citation modified and fix it.

And it will look talking about pleasant

visual experience with your briefs,

it will look better to the

reader. And so I employed that.

You mentioned citation modified

specifically in the guide.

I just wanted to throw it out there mostly

for our listeners because I know you

know what it is And I know Jody knows

what it is and we all kind of went through

the cleaned up phase before where the

blue book kind of co-opted that concept

and put another name on it.

Anything you'd like for our listeners

and viewers to know about citation

modified besides what I just said.

It's a really useful parenthetical and

even though the blue book has endorsed it

and they call it citation modified,

the originator was an attorney

named Jack Metzler who said,

"I don't want to write quotation

marks omitted, emphasis omitted,

reference footnote,

call number omitted and have all these

giant parentheticals behind a citation.

But when all I'm doing is if I'm quoting

something from a case and the case

that I'm quoting was itself

quoting a different case,

I don't need the reader to know the

case under the case that I'm quoting.

I.

Just need the reader to know what the

court that I'm quoting was trying to say.

So if that court had to add some ellipses

or add some brackets in order to say

what the court that I'm

quoting wanted to say,

I can strip out those brackets and

those ellipses and still be true to the

source that I'm quoting. So

that's what it's useful for.

And instead of all the parentheticals,

you just get a single parenthetical

that represents all of that,

which is citation modified.

What you have to be careful of is if

you're inserting your own ellipses,

if you're deleting a

word or two, or if you're

changing a word from capital to lowercase,

if you're making changes to the source

that you're quoting and those are your

changes, those are your deletions,

you've decided to take some words out,

then you do have to use the ellipses.

Then you do have to use the brackets

because you do need the reader to see

these are changes that I made to the

substance of the quote that I'm quoting.

But if you're just stripping out brackets

and ellipses that that source put in

there and modifying the

source that they were quoting,

that's when those are just additional

clunky bells and whistles that really

aren't serving any purpose for the reader.

Chris,

we are so grateful and we kept you right

up until the end when you have to go,

but thank you so much for all

these tips and everything.

And we'll post the style guide and make

it available to people because it is a

useful kind of three-page quick

reference way to really max out your

legal writing with pretty easy

controls. So thanks for joining. Yeah.

Perfect. Yeah. Thanks so much for

having me on. I had a lot of good time.

My wife is a long suffering

attorney's wife and she humors me

when I try to talk to her about the law

and legal writing and oral argument,

all these things that

I'm passionate about.

But it's not often that I get to spend

a good hour of my time just telling

appellate war stories and talking about

the finer details of legal writing with

people who care about these

things as much as I do.

So I've enjoyed the time together and I

really appreciate you guys having me on.

You bet. Thanks for being with us.

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