I will not be posting about the Friday orders list this week or next. You are on your own until June 22nd, when I return to the blog.

As blog readers know, the Texas state appellate courts are shifting toward electronic briefs. Unlike the federal system, the Texas rules permit advocates to make use of hyperlinks and encourage the use of internal bookmarks to ease navigation. The focus is on making the briefs more useful to the ultimate readers — the judges and law clerks who will use them to decide cases and write appellate opinions.

Last Thursday, I gave a presentation about electronic briefs with Blake Hawthorne at the UT Conference on State and Federal Appeals. We covered quite a bit of ground for a thirty-minute talk — the basics of how to make these briefs, some survey results from judges and staff members who have been using them for the past year, and some clips of video interviews with Texas Supreme Court Justices on the same subject.

If you weren’t able to attend and want to see the slides, you can download a plain PDF version. Unfortunately, that lacks both the live demos and the video clips. (( There is a much, much larger version that includes the video clips. I can post that later this month if there is interest. ))

And as promised, I am posting the full-length interviews with the Justices. You can play them within your web browser using these links. (The audio levels are fairly low, so you may want to grab a pair of earbuds before you hit ‘play’.) The interviews range between about eight and sixteen minutes, but they’re well worth your time if you are practicing in the Texas Supreme Court.

Justice Hecht

Justice Johnson

Justice Wainwright

P.S. I had a little trouble getting these to play in Firefox on the Mac. They seem to play fine in other browsers.