This week I attended a CLE program entitled "Law Clerks Speak." The participants included a current law clerk for a U.S. District Court judge, a recent clerk for a justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, and clerks, past and present, for different judges of the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans. (New Orleans has separate courts for civil and criminal proceedings. And, in Louisiana, we call our counties parishes.)
Among the suggestions that they made were:
1. When filing lengthy motions and memoranda, especially motions involving summary judgments, consider filing or giving the law clerk a copy of your motion and memorandum on disk. This, it was said, could make their job easier because they could then "cut and paste" from the statements of contested and uncontested facts as well as from the law portion of the memoranda.
They also suggested that the disk copies be in both WordPerfect and in Word formats so that they could be used with either program.
2. When filing jury charges, you should also provide them a copy of the charges on disk. This, too, would make their jobs easier.
3. Also when filing memoranda, if you have an especially important case that you would like to increase the odds that the clerk (and I assume also the judge) reads the case in full, attach a print copy of the case to the memo. Even though the case is available electronically or in print in a West Reporter, clerks and judges sometimes just don't have the extra time to pull up the case electronically or to go to a Reporter.
(Interestingly, with regard to appeals to the federal Fifth Circuit, local Fifth Circuit Rule 31.1 provides that represented parties, with certain exceptions, must provide a diskette copy of their briefs to the court and to opposing counsel.)
Posted by ajlevy at March 18, 2005 7:15 PM