Civil Law & Litigation for Paralegals 1st Edition by Neal Bevans

Exercise 28

Create a brief bank. If your firm does not already have a brief bank, perhaps you should create one. A brief bank is an archive of the appellate briefs filed in previous cases that can be quickly and easily retrieved. There are many issues in appeals that recur over and over again. Why reinvent the wheel each time, when you can rely on previous research and writing to minimize the time it takes to create a new brief? In the old days, paralegals would make hard copies of appellate briefs and then file them according to subject or put appellate subjects on index cards to help retrieve the brief later. These days, most paralegals keep brief banks on a computer. After all, the briefs are almost always created using a word processing program like Word® or WordPerfect®. Why not use this same system to create a brief bank?
Each argument section of old briefs can be pulled out and indexed separately. The subjects could be saved on the computer hard drive (and on a back-up floppy or CD) as follows:
• Appeal: Waiver of issue by failure to object at trial.
• Evidence: Demonstrative.
• Appeal: Failure to conform to appellate rules.
• Witnesses: Unavailable for trial.
• Cert: Petition for cert to state supreme court.
• Witnesses: Expert witness in auto reconstruction.
• Cert: Petition for cert to U.S. Supreme Court.
• Witnesses: Expert witness in medical standard of care.
• Evidence: Hearsay exceptions.
Prepare the basic formulation of a brief bank by reviewing recent decisions from your state's highest appellate court. Choose
topics related to civil litigation, including evidence law, expert witnesses, pleadings, and motions, to name a few.