Or, should I say, the blog is back. I’m not sure how much blogging I will do in the near future, but at least the old posts are up again after an extended outage. The fix was really simple, but it took three tech support guys at my hosting provider, over the course of a week, to figure out that simple solution. My apologies to my regular readers. That means Ben and . . . anyone? Anyone?
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Second District Court of Appeal to implement TrueFiling e-filing system in late 2016
According to a notice I received today from the California Appellate Project: The clerk of the 2nd District Court of Appeal has asked us to inform the panel that True Filing will be available in this district beginning in November. For two months, November and December, True Filing will coexist with the present eFiling system presently being used in the district. The choice of which to use will be yours. Then, in January, the present eFiling system will disappear, and everyone will be required to use True Filing. Those of you already working in other districts with True Filing will definitely have a leg up on the rest of us.…
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The 2015 edition of the California Litigation Review is Out
The 2015 edition of the California Litigation Review hit my mailbox yesterday. It is published by the Litigation Section of the California State Bar and it has some terrific coverage of appeals and writs developments last year . . . and I don’t say that just because the vast majority of the cases examined in it were covered here as they happened, including: Jameson v. Desta (2015) 24 Cal.App.4th 491 (indigent plaintiff with fee waiver unable to afford court reporter still held limited in appellate argument by absence of transcript); Hewlett-Packard Co. v. Oracle Corp. (2015) 239 Cal.App.4th 1174 (in which the court offered some friendly advice to the legislature for modification of…
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Some technical help for e-filing in the Court of Appeal
This week, the Second District Court of Appeal published a terrific guide for creating electronic documents. (PDF link) The guide is broken down into a section on briefs and a section on appendices, and is meant as a technical guide, not a set of rules for filing. It is thus helpful regardless of the district your appeal is in. The guide provides the nitty-gritty detailed steps, with illustrations, for creating, editing, and formatting documents for electronic filing, including instructions for safely and securely redacting information, adding bookmarks, and making scanned documents text-searchable, among other things. Unfortunately, instructions on hyperlinking have been deferred to a future edition. I wouldn’t quite call it Electronic Filing for Dummies, though…
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Mandatory E-filing comes to the Third District Court of Appeal
Details here. The court has adopted a new Local Rule 5 covering e-filing procedures, which become effective September 14. It looks like documents need to be filed through the proprietary TrueFiling system. If you have an appeal pending in the third district now, make sure you register for the e-filing system promptly.
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Are records on appeal from the Los Angeles Superior Court about to get better?
The headline is not a dig at anyone at the Los Angeles Superior Court (LASC). It refers to the impact of the statewide court budget crunch, which led many courts to stop providing court reporters as a matter of course. Faced with having to engage court reporters on their own, some litigants were foregoing the expense, at risk of having records inadequate to prosecute their appeals. As a result, parties are appealing decisions without the reporter’s transcript that they would have been able to order under the old system. That can spell trouble for an appeal. Last Friday, the LASC announced that it is hiring court reporters. Actually, I can’t tell…
- Announcements, Legal Writing, Summary Judgment, Summary Judgment and Summary Adjudication, Waiver of Issues
SB 470 codifies Reid v. Google, Inc., provides that objections to summary judgment evidence are preserved for appeal
On Monday, according to this article at The Recorder, Governor Brown signed SB 470, amending Code of Civil Procedure section 437c, which governs procedure for motions for summary judgment and summary adjudication. For appellate practitioners, the significance of the bill lies in its codification of Reid v. Google, Inc. (2010) 50 Cal.4th 512. Reid held that objections to evidence submitted in support of a motion for summary judgment are preserved for appeal even if the trial court fails to rule on the objections. Prior to Reid, the courts were split on whether such objections were preserved. I’m unaware of any lingering controversy over the issue since Reid, but it is nonetheless satisfying to see its holding codified.…
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Changes to the blog
Regular readers will note a different look to the blog, which I implemented over the weekend. I actually liked the old look better, but my WordPress upgrade “broke” the Headway theme I used to create it. So, I’ve used a stock WordPress theme, which I was able to customize only in color and font choice. I’ll get back to a custom look once I figure out the new version of Headway, but that may be several months from now. Upgrading my WordPress installation has significant “back end” benefits for me (most notably, better backup capabilities and comment spam prevention), but also has several benefits for readers. The broken commenting function has been…
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California Supreme Court invites your comment on proposed changes to publication rules involving cases accepted for review
I expect that in this age of electronic research, most lawyers have experienced the frustration of finding the “perfect” case, only to learn it is unpublished and therefore could not be cited as precedent. (See rule 8.1115(a), Cal. Rules of Court.) Even in the “old days,” when research was limited to hard copy books, you could still find the perfect cases whisked out from under you, either because it was later disapproved or, more frustratingly, had been accepted for review by the Supreme Court, which has the effect of automatically de-publishing the case. (See rule 8.1105(e)(1), Cal. Rules of Court.) That may change. Yesterday, the Supreme Court posted for comment…
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Congrats and thank you to the new TEN Networks Blog (and welcome, TEN members!)
The TEN Networks, Inc. launched its blog last week, and the editors graciously designated The California Blog of Appeal as one of its Member Blogs of the Month, along with with Elderupdates.com, the blog of Encino elder law attorney Brian Shepphard. The TEN Networks is the umbrella organization for two business networking groups: The Esquire Network, a fantastic attorney group with a unique meeting structure, of which I am an enthusiastic member; and The Executive Network, which is open to other professionals. I encourage you to check them out. Finally, how fortuitous (divine?) that TEN’s new blog would honor this one around the time I made my shameless plea for…
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Shameless request for nominations
Expert witness service The Expert Institute is taking nominations for entries in its 2015 Best Legal Blog Contest. Do I need to say anything more? OK, here comes the shameless part. Whether you are a years-long fanatical subscriber to this blog whose first action every morning upon waking is to grab your iPhone off your nightstand and check your RSS reader to see if there are any updates to this blog, or someone who just came across this blog yesterday, give some thought to nominating this blog. If you do, you should nominate it in the “niche” category. (If Best Blog By A Guy Who Does The Best He Can With…
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The blog will be down for maintenance starting later today
I’ll be taking the blog offline some time this afternoon or this evening to update some of the software on the back end. I don’t know if it will be down for a few hours or a few days — it all depends on how smoothly things go. Wish me luck and pray that I don’t hopelessly screw everything up.
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Now in session: The Ninth Circuit Blog of Appeals!
Just before Christmas, I announced that this blog would be spinning off a new blog, The Ninth Circuit Blog of Appeals, with the start of the new year. I’m pleased to announce that The Ninth Circuit Blog of Appeals is now in session. This is the follow-up post I promised about how I reached the decision to split this blog and my plans for managing both of them. First, an explanation as to why I am resuming blogging on a more regular basis. As regular readers recall, my blogging frequency dropped off dramatically in 2009. I posted from time to time, but not with the regularity and enthusiasm with which I…
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Unlike the Ninth Circuit, this blog is soon to be split in two
And just how, you might be wondering, is a blog with a single blogger going to split up? Since this blog’s inception, I have covered case law and issues in the Ninth Circuit as well as California state court. Based on responses to the blog, however, it appears few people arrive by looking for federal information. Am I missing out on readers — and maybe even business — by having coverage of federal issues buried in a blog called The California Blog of Appeal? Well, I’m going to try to find out. Starting January 1, 2010, your humble blogger is going to be pulling double blog duty, covering case law…
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A Note to my Feed Subscribers
A glitch over the weekend resulted in a post to this blog that didn’t belong here. You’ll know it when you see it. Rather than trying to figure out what it has to do with appeals, rest assured that it doesn’t . . . it didn’t even belong on the blog! Sorry for any resulting confusion.
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Proposed Meeting of Law Bloggers at the California State Bar Convention
Victoria Pynchon of the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog asked that I pass along her suggestion for a law blogger meeting at the California State Bar Convention this week, and I do so gladly. From Victoria: Please let me know if you’re interested in a legal bloggers meeting at the state bar convention in monterey this week. We could have drinks at the Hyatt between, say, 5 and 7 on the 27th — the annual dinner & cabaret starts at 7 p.m. that evening — Saturday — and we could just flow into that event; or we could do Thursday AT the Opening Night reception, which starts at 5:45 .…
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Time for Another WordPress Upgrade
I’m behind in upgrading to WordPress version 2.6, so I’m going to try to do it this weekend. That means a brief outage during the upgrade process. Previous upgrades have gone smoothly, and with any luck, the blog should not be down more than about 15 minutes, probably late Friday or Saturday night.
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My New Digs . . . and New Everything Else
Some of you may have noticed some changes in sidebar information that clued you in to my recent relocation and change of practice name. Most of you probably didn’t, so here’s everything you need to know (more than you need, actually) in one post. First, the new digs. I’ve moved from Ventura to Oxnard, and specifically to the Fisherman’s Wharf area of Channel Islands Harbor, where you’ll find the fine gentleman at right (the one in the yellow coat) standing post in front of the Ventura County Maritime Museum, which is in the building next to my office. I’ve gone from a professional building in a busy part of town…
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Happy Birthday to The California Blog of Appeal!
Image via Wikipedia per GNU Free Documentation License The California Blog of Appeal launched at 3:12 pm on April 30, 2007, with a first post entitled “The California Blog of Appeal Will Now Come to Order!” (Seemed clever at the time, anyway.) I don’t think I’ve wandered far from the vision I described in that post. So, if I may be self-congratulatory for a few minutes . . . This is the 539th post on this blog. The 539 posts span 135 categories (I may be going a bit overboard on cateogrization) and altogether contain more than 164,000 words. That’s the equivalent of nearly a dozen maximum length civil appellate…
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Brief Outage for Upgrade Monday Night
I will be upgrading The California Blog of Appeal to WordPress 2.5 on Monday night. Previous upgrades have gone off without a hitch, requiring only about 15 minutes of downtime. This one should run just as smoothly, but you never know. On the off chance you can’t access the blog on Tuesday, rest assured the situation is temporary. This post will stay at the top of the blog until the upgrade is complete. Scroll down to make sure you haven’t missed anything.
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Site Upgrade Notes and Request for Assistance
I upgraded the blog from WordPress 2.2 to WordPress 2.3 overnight. You may see some minor fluctuations in the site as a result. For example, I have removed the site stats from the right sidebar because the plug-in does not seem compatible with this new version of WordPress. No big loss. Nobody was looking there to see that I have posted more than 71,000 words in 226 posts, right? As far as commenting goes, comment previews seem to be working. The Blogfollow plug-in does not seem to be working, but I’d appreciate it if someone else would try posting a comment to this post so I can be sure the…
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Posting Schedule
I will be out of town starting tomorrow and will not return until Monday night. I’ve set up posts in advance for tomorrow and Friday, so they obviously won’t cover breaking news. I’m not sure if I will have internet access, so I may not be able to see the latest cases or court news until my return.
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Posting Schedule
I will be in San Diego or in transit July 17-19 and doubt I will be accessing the blog in that time. If there’s a blog storm over some bombshell opinion between now and Friday and you’re wondering why I have nothing to say about it, it’s because I’m either driving, in my seminar, or with my wife and 5-year-old daughter watching Shamu and the other killer whales jump through hoops. You will have to content yourself with the posts I have already drafted and scheduled to publish automatically (assuming I did it right) through July 19. The California Blog of Appeal will thus have at least one new post…
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Snap Shots are Back
Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more. Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not. Readers of this blog at its original WordPress host will remember that this feature disappeared when I moved to my own host on June 11.…
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Some Small Changes
Regular readers will note some small changes to the post and commenting formats. First, the comment form now includes a field for your URL. If you fill out this field with the URL of your own blog, then a recent snippet from your blog will appear immediately below your comment. For an example, check the comment I have added to this post. In effect, you’re advertising on my blog. This service is by way of a plug-in called “Blogfollow,” and the Blogfollow badge appears below each post and on the comment page (which may be overkill — I’ll probably take it out of the position below each post). Hovering over…
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Legal Blog Nominations
OK, this is just a little outside my normal subject matter. But since I figure most of my visitors are regular readers of legal blogs, I thought I should tip you all off to the fact that Legal Antics is soliciting nominations for its upcoming list of “Top 10 funniest law blogs.” Look for me to add a “Legal Humor” category to the blogroll in the next few days.
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The Move is Complete — Welcome to the Self-Hosted California Blog of Appeal!
I got everything done, and from now on I’ll be posting exclusively here at the self-hosted site. No more posts will be made to the WordPress site, except in order to direct traffic here. Some things you may need to do: Bookmarks: If you had the WordPress URL bookmarked, you need to update your bookmark for The California Blog of Appeal to http://www.calblogofappeal.com. Posts Feed: If you were a subscriber to the feed from the WordPress site and wish to continue receiving a feed, you need to update the feed URL to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheCaliforniaBlogOfAppeal. You can subscribe to the posts feed automatically using either the newsreader button or web aggregator button…
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Other Judicial Council Proposals Awaiting Comment
In addition to the three proposals I posted about today, the Judicial Council is soliciting comments on several other proposals. They are consolidated here. There is also a downloadable fact sheet on “How a Proposal Becomes a Rule.”
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Changes Made and Changes Coming to The California Blog of Appeal
I’m in the process of setting up my own web host for The California Blog of Appeal. Right now, the blog is hosted on WordPress.com. at the URL http://calblogofappeal.wordpress.com. Those of you who have found the blog through a link from another site already know this. But those of you accessing the blog through the URL http://www.calblogofappeal.com may not. I have domain forwarding set up on the calblogofappeal.com domain name and, until tonight, also had domain masking enabled. That means that if you typed in the URl http://www.calblogofappeal.com, you were forwarded to the WordPress URL but it was hidden from you. The chief drawback to this domain forwarding and masking…
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RSS Feed Issue Resolved
I’ve corrected the RSS Feed link in the right sidebar. The former link was inadvertently set up with an incorrect address for the feed. So, if you have tried unsuccessfully to subscribe to the feed, try again. I’ve also added direct links to subscribe to the feed through a number of services, such as Google, Yahoo, etc., so users of those services no longer have to go to the newsreader link and then click on another link at that page.