Sometimes, an appeal doesn’t make sense to me. This can be true even if there are better-than-average odds of winning. When an appeal doesn’t make sense to me, I ask why the party wants to appeal. I’m sure that most of the time, the reaction is to think, “Isn’t it obvious? Because I lost!” But to my mind, that’s not always a good enough reason. As a matter of effective client relations, I get curious about motives when it seems to me, as an outsider, that a win on appeal would yield a negligible benefit or even risk making the appellant worse off. An example of the latter situation is…