Find Lawyers in Alabama, United States for Appellate Practice
Practice Area Overview
Appellate practice involves different skills and strategic considerations than trial practice. On appeal, the focus shifts from developing and proving facts (through discovery, examining witnesses, and trial) to the legal issues that decide the case. Effective appellate advocacy thus demands a formulation of the issues that is focused on what is important to a panel of appellate judges deciding the case.
In formulating the issues on appeal, an appellate lawyer conducts thorough legal research; analyzes the legal issues in light of the rule-making and policy considerations that shape the development of law; and then presents the facts and those issues and arguments selected for appeal concisely in a persuasive appellate brief.
The importance of a well-crafted appellate brief cannot be exaggerated. Appellate briefs receive greater judicial scrutiny than written materials prepared at trial because they are reviewed by a panel of judges, rather than a single judge, along with those judges’ larger legal staff, under comparatively less time pressure than exists in the trial court. As one appellate court has explained, appellate work is “most assuredly not the recycling of trial level points and authorities” but instead “entails rigorous original work in its own right” and “offers counsel probably their best opportunity to craft work of original, professional, and, on occasion, literary value.” In re Marriage of Shaban, 88 Cal. App. 4th 398, 408-10 (2001).
After the appellate briefing, oral argument is an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the appellate judges regarding the issues in the case. To be effective, appellate oral advocacy must be keyed to the unique concerns of the appellate forum – avoiding emotional or fact-based pleas that may play well before a jury, but instead focusing on the dispositive legal issues, being sure to answer the judges’ questions.
In addition to the practice in the appellate courts, appellate lawyers play important roles in the trial courts. Appellate lawyers collaborate with trial counsel on strategic and tactical matters to raise all applicable arguments and make the appropriate trial record, identifying and preserving legal issues as they arise and crafting effective motions on substantive legal issues – before, during, and after trial.
Therefore, involving an appellate lawyer in a case as early as possible is important to ensure the best chance of success both at trial and on appeal.
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Marc James Ayers is a member of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP's Appellate Litigation Group. He represents individual, corporate and governmental clients before state and federal appellate and trial courts. Marc is listed in Best Lawyers in Americain the field of Appellate Law, and has handled numerous appeals in the U.S. Courts of Appeals, the Alabama Supreme Court, the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals, and other state appellate courts. He has also represented clients on petitions for certio...
Kane is particularly active in the public education sector, where he has represented both public universities and boards of education on tax and finance matters, and he currently serves on the faculty of the University of Alabama's academy for finance training for new school superintendents and chief school financial officers. In addition to bond counsel engagements, he has served as company counsel and bank counsel in letter-of-credit backed transactions, as lender’s counsel in direct ...
Mr. Canupp is a shareholder in the firm and an adjunct professor of employment law at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Mr. Canupp’s practice focuses on complex civil litigation, with an emphasis on litigation in federal court, both at the trial and appellate levels. Among other areas of practice, Mr. Canupp frequently is engaged on issues of constitutional law; voting rights, civil rights, and police liability claims; and employment litigation. A former federal law clerk, he has...
Joseph H. Driver is a shareholder in Carr Allison’s Birmingham, Alabama office. Joe heads up the firm’s Appellate Litigation group. He is admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States District Court for the Northern and Middle Districts of Alabama. In addition to his appellate practice, Joe handles cases involving general liability, premises liability, products liability, workers’ compensation, retali...
Ed R. Haden is a partner with Balch & Bingham LLP, chairs the firm's Appellate Practice Group, and is the author of the Alabama Appellate Practice (LexisNexis) . Ed has twenty years of legal experience in the government and private sectors, has worked on over 100 appeals, and his practice focuses on appellate litigation in the Supreme Court of Alabama and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Ed specializes in knowing the written and unwritten rules and practices necessary t...
Rudy is a partner in the firm’s Litigation and Intellectual Property Practice Groups. In his litigation practice, Rudy handles matters at both trial and appellate levels. At the trial level, he has first-chaired jury trials in both federal and state courts. Rudy has also briefed and presented oral arguments in both state and federal appellate courts.
Mr. Kelly’s practice covers a wide range of civil litigation, with an emphasis on medical malpractice and appellate law. He has handled appeals involving many areas of the law, including medical malpractice, patent infringement, fraud, bad faith, employment law, premises liability, workers’ compensation, education law, and civil rights claims.
Matt Lembke, one of five Bradley Arant Boult Cummings lawyers to have clerked for the Supreme Court of the United States, has the broad range of skills necessary to be effective in representing clients at both the trial and appellate levels. He has applied those skills for more than 16 years in dozens of high-stakes cases. Matt has extensive experience in handling appeals pending in both state and federal courts, including arguing cases in the Alabama Supreme Court and the D.C., Fifth, and El...
Dan Martin is a partner in the Litigation Practice Group. He represents clients in corporate compliance, white collar criminal defense, employment, and commercial litigation matters.Dan is a member of the firm’s corporate compliance and white collar defense team. A litigator and trial attorney since 2004, Dan has significant experience in a broad spectrum of civil and criminal disputes, particularly in the areas of commercial litigation, corporate compliance and white collar criminal ma...
Mr. McKee began his law practice in his hometown of Florence, Alabama. He then served as the central staff attorney for the Alabama Supreme Court for several years. While living in Montgomery, he also served as a professor of law at the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law of Faulkner University. Mr. McKee moved to Birmingham in 1986 to take a full-time teaching position at the Cumberland School of Law of Samford University, where he later served as the assistant dean. In 1989, he joined the Hare...
Honza Prchal is an associate of the firm whose areas of emphasis include mass torts, especially pharmaceutical and medical device work, and also general litigation. He has spent at least half his time on mass torts even before he started working with W. Lewis Garrison, Jr. in 1998, and he continues to enjoy helping clients navigate and understand an esoteric and confusing area of law where it is far too easy and far too common for clients to feel like numbers, rather than individuals with cla...
Barry is a litigator in our Birmingham office. He recently returned to Sirote, where he began his legal career, after spending the last 15 years representing defendants and plaintiffs in anti-trust, securities, insurance and business fraud cases. He also handles matters involving products liability, shareholder, and other complex litigation and class actions. Barry represents clients in state and federal courts.
Thomas Richie represents clients in procedurally complex civil litigation, both in trial and appellate courts throughout Alabama and across the country. He has litigated a broad range of cases, from class actions to municipal tax disputes to the Chapter 9 bankruptcy case of Jefferson County, Alabama. He has been recognized as a “Rising Star” by Alabama Super Lawyers, and has had success both asserting and defending claims. Thomas has litigated cases in Alabama, Georgia, Massachuse...
Michael Sansbury has represented clients in trial and appellate courts across the United States. He has argued in courts ranging from Oregon Circuit Court to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He has examined countless witnesses—from the president of a multi-national corporation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to a newspaper publisher from Auburn, Alabama—and has tried issues in state and federal courts in Alabama. Always thinking of the long-term impact, Sansbury spec...
William Shreve practices in the areas of appellate advocacy, insurance coverage, and civil litigation. He has handled more than 100 appeals and petitions for extraordinary writ in the Alabama Supreme Court, Alabama Court of Civil Appeals, and United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He has represented insurers and insureds in numerous coverage matters, preparing coverage opinions, prosecuting declaratory-judgment actions, defending breach-of-contract/bad-faith cases, and inter...
Scott Burnett Smith is a partner in the firm’s Huntsville office. His practice covers class actions, complex litigation, and appeals. Scott has been involved in dozens of nationwide class actions in state and federal courts, and he has handled over 30 class action appeals. He is also regularly involved as the appellate lawyer embedded with a trial team in complex civil litigation. In that role, he has succeeded in having several multi-million dollar injury verdicts (including punitive d...
Sharon Stuart devotes her practice to civil trial work and arbitration. She focuses on complex commercial and insurance litigation, and she handles a variety of product liability cases including pharmaceutical and medical device products liability litigation as national, regional or local counsel. Her trial experience includes a wide range of business tort claims, contract disputes, commercial and insurance fraud and bad faith suits, and wrongful death cases. She has defended dozens of class ...
Emily Tidmore is an appellate lawyer and commercial litigator who has represented clients in complex commercial litigation throughout the country, including in the United States Supreme Court. Her litigation experience includes commercial and labor-and-employment class actions, business torts, intellectual property disputes, transportation regulation, Chapter 9 (municipal) bankruptcy, and punitive damages and federal preemption issues. Emily was named as the 2018 “Lawyer of the Year&rdq...
A fifth-generation attorney with 40 years of legal experience, Bill’s practice at Helmsing Leach is focused on civil litigation with an emphasis on appellate advocacy. He has handled numerous appeals in state and federal courts resulting in more than one hundred published decisions. Bill’s practice also includes environmental law and insurance litigation, and he has represented clients in a variety of civil disputes in product liability, construction litigation and more. In additi...
David G. Wirtes, Jr. is a member of Cunningham Bounds, LLC, of Mobile, Alabama, where he works behind the scenes on strategic planning, legal issues and appeals. Dave is admitted to practice before all state and federal courts serving Alabama and Mississippi. He has been rated by his peers as “AV” (preeminent for ethical standards and legal abilities) as shown at www.martindale.com . Dave helps his colleagues through service in numerous professional organizations. He is a member o...
Thomas A. “Tom” Woodall is a shareholder in Dentons Sirote’s Birmingham, Alabama office, where he is a member of the Litigation practice group and leads the Dentons Sirote Alternative Dispute Resolution team. As a former Alabama Supreme Court Justice, Tom’s practice focuses on all aspects of the appellate process, from drafting briefs and motions to oral arguments, in all Alabama and federal appellate courts, including the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals, the Alabama Su...
Stanley Blackmon concentrates his practice on high-stakes and appellate litigation throughout the federal and state court systems, with a focus on legal strategy, motion practice and appeals. Stanley has handled appeals at the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth, Tenth, Eleventh Circuits and in appellate courts in Alabama, Texas, Wisconsin, and Maine. Stanley has recently worked on appeals that resulted in significant victories for clients: a unanimous reversal of circuit precedent by the en...
Aaron Chastain represents financial services institutions, healthcare companies, and other businesses in a broad range of litigation and compliance-related matters. Aaron has advised student loan and mortgage loan originators and servicers in complying with the complex universe of regulation and state lien laws, as well as in handling finance-related litigation, such as claims for violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), wrongful foreclosure, violations of the Truth in Le...
Stephen Parsley practices primarily in the Banking and Financial Services Practice Group, where he assists clients with complex and dispositive motions, appeals, compliance, and general strategy. Stephen has litigated hundreds of cases in federal and state courts, including several oral arguments before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In addition to his extensive appellate experience, he often assists clients at the trial level by briefing motions. Stephen strives to keep the big picture ...
Alyse N. Windsor is a shareholder in Dentons Sirote’s Litigation practice group. Alyse concentrates her practice in representing clients in business, insurance, and healthcare disputes in both state and federal courts. She also regularly represents clients in arbitrations before the American Arbitration Association ("AAA") and other arbitral tribunals and administrative bodies. Prior to joining the firm, Alyse served as a law clerk for the Honorable Karon Bowdre, Chief Judge of the Unit...
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