The California Appellate Law Podcast
Episodes
226 episodes
Legal-Writing Mentor John Nielsen Compares CA and UT Courts
Appellate attorney John Nielsen is forever grateful to his mentors when he was a young attorney, and he pays it forward now both as a mentor himself and by offering tips on legal writing published at the Appellate Advocacy Blog. John discusses ...
Laboratory of Judiciaries: Comparing CA and IL Courts
This podcast is often a soapbox for complaining about oddities in the California court system. But then we wondered: are the courts in other states better? Maybe they’re the same—or worse. So we thought we should start a conversation with a cou...
Ten Trial Tips That Appellate Specialists Want You to Know
You trial attorneys have a job to do. That job is to win the trial. And you can’t always do that and win the appeal at the same time. So you can’t pick a fight on every point. But, you had better fight the ones that turn the case.And, yo...
Negligent Referrals and Other Ethical Traps in Potential Client Relationships
For attorneys, the best referral is a referral from another attorney. But before you refer to another attorney, beware of the ethical traps. Kristi Thomas, a labor and employment attorney who also focuses on ethical issue, warns in a recent art...
What You Need to Know about Fee-and-Costs Awards on Appeal
The issue that most often drags appeals back into more litigation is attorney fee and costs. What happens when, while focusing on the appeal, the prevailing party gets a substantial award of fees and costs?Do you have to separately ...
PMQ Declarations, Extortion & AI Judges
On this cases-and-tidbits episode, Jeff Lewis and I discuss:Ramirez v. Avon Products: There ...
Latest Trends in Defending Unfair Competition Claims, with Greg Nylen
With his background as a brewery owner, business litigator Greg Nylen defends attorneys from “the triumvirate” of unfair-competition claims: the Unfair Competition Law, the False Advertising Law, and the Consumer Legal Remedies Act. Greg shares...
Special Education Law with Tim Adams
The autism pandemic now affects between 1-in-44 and 1-in-35 children by the age of 8, according to a December 2021 Rutgers report—a rate that has climbed some 241% since 2000.And one of the big ways this affects the millions of families ...
Recent Case Tips on Expert Objections, and Strategy on MSJ & SLAPP Hearings
Gearing up for trial with experts? You’re ready with your Sargon and Sanchez objections. But don’t forget Kelly: if the expert’s opinion is outside the consensus, that’s not a Sargon objection—you have t...
The Best Advocacy Tips of 2022
In this roundup episode, we summarize the best tips for briefing, argument, and overall advocacy from the judges, attorneys, and specialists Jeff Lewis and I interviewed on the California Appellate Law Podcast in 2022.Some of the tips an...
The Coming Changes to Med-Mal Caps, with Ben Ikuta
The reason there are so few medical-malpractice attorneys is that, on top of having to overcome juries’ strong pro-doctor bias, damages caps turn even the most hard-fought wins into mere break-even propositions. So how did Ben Ikuta, a new guar...
2,000 Appeals and Beyond, with John Dodd
What does an appeal look like after having done 2,000 of them? John Dodd is one of the few people with that vantage. A former staff attorney at the Court of Appeal who has volunteered on the juvenile-dependency panel along with his civil appeal...
Top Cases of 2022
Need to catch up on important cases you missed in 2022? This end-of-year episode has you covered. Here’s the list:Most Important Case for Money Litigators:
New Cases on MSJ Evidence Rulings and Elder Abuse Attachment Orders
Evidentiary rulings on MSJ are reviewed under the same deferential standard as given evidentiary rulings at trial—i.e., for abuse of discretion—but the Supreme Court cracked the door open on the possibility of de novo review in its 2010 ...
New Case Tips for Judgment Creditors & Litigation Privilege
If you have a judgment against a debtor and you want to do some judgment collection in another state, is personal jurisdiction an obstacle? Do you have to show the debtor has minimum contacts with the other state? No, says a new published case....
“Being Inauthentic Is a Betrayal of People’s Expectations”: Kyle Schneberg on Nursing Home Injury Law
After amassing $100 million for his personal-injury clients, Gerry Spence Trial Lawyer’s College alumnus Kyle Schneberg started Bedsore Law, a national law firm protecting the rights of elders in nursing h...
M.C. Sungaila Reports Back After Over 100 Interviews of Women Judges & Attorneys at the Portia Project
M.C. Sungaila has advocated at some of the highest levels of appellate law, and last year took her experience and her heart for mentoring and public interest work to the Portia Project podcast, where she distills the wisdom and experience of wo...
“You Can’t Lose a Case by Making It Too Clear”: An Interview with Justice John Zebrowski
When the Supreme Court applied lis pendens law inconsistent with the lis pendens statute, Justice Zebrowski wrote a letter that got the attention of the State Bar. That got him on a lis pendens “task force,” which in turn was responsible for co...
Where’s the Harm?! & Other October 2022 Cases
Every attorney knows that to reverse an order, it’s not enough to prove error. You also have to prove the error harmed your client. But when the Court of Appeal in Transcon Financial, Inc. v. Reid & Hellyer reversed a sanctions ord...
The Lawyer Who Reversed the “Victory Bell” Case, with Brooke Bove
If you were a lawyer drawing breath in summer 2022, you heard about the “victory bell” case. A prominent defense attorney, returning to base camp with a stunning victory after defensing a medical malpractice case, rang his firm’s victory bell a...
“Gateway Drugs” to Legal Tech, with Ernie Svenson
We attorneys are trained to spot patterns, but many of us are poor at spotting patterns of inefficiency in the way we practice. Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson joins this episode of the California Appellate Law Podcast to explain how lawyers can a...
Zoom Trials Are Not (Yet) the New Normal
Jeff and Tim discuss some recent cases to add to your attorney toolkit:For personal injury attorneys, a recent civil-criminal crossover case dealing with victims’ right to restitution warns: the right to restitution is not waived un...
“You Know It When You See It”: Justice Thompson (Ret.) on Writ Relief and Judicial Philosophy
Before Justice David Thompson left the bench in 2021 to become a private neutral, his colleague Justice Bedsworth called him “hard-headed.” And compassionate. But hard-headed? Justice Thompsons explains what Justice Bedsworth probably meant by ...
The Cal. Supreme Court’s Outgoing and Incoming Chief Justices, with David Ettinger
The California Supreme Court is getting a new chief justice. What does it mean? The author of prominent legal blog At the Lectern, David Ettinger, joins co-hosts Tim Kowal and Jeff Lewis to look back on Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye’s 11-ye...
New Lawyer’s Toolkit Cases on Missing Findings & E-Filing Mishaps
What happens when the court fails to make required findings? Probably not, because the California Supreme Court says you still have to demonstrate prejudice. But in this episode of the California Appellate Law Podcast, Jeff Lewis and Tim Kowal ...
