No Associates, No Apologies: How CALG Flattened the Pyramid

Tim Kowal Our guest on this episode of the California Appellate Law Podcast is Ben Feuer, Feuer like lawyer, and not as I mispronounced it when introducing him fewer as in less than. Ben Feuer is co-founder and chair of the Complex Appellate Litigation Group, founded in California but now rapidly expanding across the country, including DC. Ben and his firm are something to watch. Are you interested in appellate litigation but don't want to work 2,000 hours as a junior associate? Well, Ben talks about how CALG rejected the traditional law firm pyramid, paying lawyers a percentage of billings while building teams of seasoned appellate attorneys and court alumni. We talk about how CALG flattens the pyramid. We also discuss how Ben and CALG develop writing and AI rules for 28 appellate attorneys, each with decades of experience, including former justices. CALG is made up of court insiders, and Ben explains why it pays to write like a court insider. And build trust with your reader. Here's our conversation with Ben Feuer.

Jeffrey Lewis Welcome everyone, I am Jeff Lewis.

Tim Kowal And I'm Tim Cowal. Our guest today is Ben Fuhr. Ben is the chair of the Complex Appellate Litigation Group, a premier appellate boutique based in California. I think based in California, although you're all over the place now, but you started in California. did I get that part right at least?

Ben Feuer Yeah, so we are primarily in California. We have a Washington, DC office, but we have five offices, four of which are in California. Our firm was founded in San Francisco. Most of our lawyers are in San Francisco. I would guess about when I say most, maybe just over half. and about a third of our lawyers are in Los Angeles. we have a fairly sizable contingent now in San Diego. we have a small Newport Beach office, and we have one lawyer in Washington, D.C. Yeah.

Tim Kowal You're on you're on my turf now, Ben. Okay. that but that was the one part of the intro that I riffed on. I wanted to make sure I didn't get off on the wrong foot. I'll get let me get through the rest of Ben's bio. the National Law Journal named Ben an elite boutique trailblazer. The Bar Association of San Francisco awarded him its outstanding barrister prize. Law Dragon called him one of the 500 leading litigators in America, and Super Lawyers has listed him for more than 15 years. I'm very interested in how he has grown. complex appellate litigation group so successfully in such a short amount of time that I'm here just really to take notes on how to grow a law firm. And Ben graciously agreed to let us record the conversation for the podcast. Ben's writing has also appeared in Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, as well as National Law Journal, Daily Journal, Recorder. and corporate counsel. He's a regular guest on KALW Public Radio, KGO Talk Radio, and Voice of America broadcasts on upcoming appellate issues and Supreme Court cases. He served as an appellate lawyer representative to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. And he served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit under Judge Carlos Bea in San Francisco. So, Ben, with all that out of the way, welcome to the podcast and thank you for joining us.

Ben Feuer thank you, Tim. You make me sound very busy.

Tim Kowal Yeah.

Ben Feuer I I'm not sure how I did all of that stuff or where I found time. It was before I had kids. That's the only possible explanation.

Tim Kowal It all comes to a screeching halt then, yeah.

Ben Feuer Yeah, exactly.

Tim Kowal Well, in recent CALG news, in although let me for hygiene of pronunciation, how do you internally in the shop pronounce the firm's name? Okay.

Ben Feuer Yeah, we call it CALG That that's really how we we do it. And just to clarify also from the intro, my name is pronounced Feuer, like lawyer. It's a German word for fire, so it seems like it should be a fairly common name, but it's three vowels in a row. Americans get it wrong all the time. And to make it even more complicated, the city attorney in Los Angeles has the same last name, but he pronounces it wrong, as does his wife, who's a justice on the Court of Appeal in the second district in Los Angeles pronounced it wrong. They know that. I've actually talked to them about it. They know that it's mispronounced in the way they do it. But it's actually much easier for Americans and it's how their family does it. you mentioned my the judge I clerk for Carlos Bea we're very close. We're good friends. We talk regularly. He's still 20 years after I clerked for him, pronounces my last name wrong, and it's fine. I don't put any pressure on anyone over it. As long as they know they're talking to me or about me, then it's fine. Of course if they're saying anything bad, I assume they're talking about someone else entirely. If they it's totally different than fewer. Fewer, of course. Yeah,

Tim Kowal Different Benfoyer. Yeah. well I apologize. I everyone always pronounces my name incorrectly. people in my family don't even pronounce the name consistently. so

Ben Feuer Right.

Tim Kowal I just stuck with the pronunciation that I heard from my drunk uncle once and I

Ben Feuer That's the way to go, really. I think that you're absolutely onto something. Anything the drunk uncle says is right. but we

Tim Kowal And

Ben Feuer do pronounce it CALG internally in the firm because it's a mouthful otherwise. and we chose the name of the firm sort of very carefully, right? I mean, it's one of the first things that sort of makes our firm a little bit different, is we have a trade name rather than sort of my name, which Again, everyone would mispronounce, so it wouldn't go very well.

Tim Kowal No.

Ben Feuer but my name or the name of some of the key partners in the firm. and we did that very consciously when we were setting up the firm. because when we set up this firm, and I give you a little bit of the history of sort of how we set it up and why we set it up the way we did and what makes the firm so different, which I think is one of the main reasons the firm has been so successful. but we did it with a with a a very We really thought very carefully about the sort of positives and negatives of doing it just the way we've done it. we founded the firm or I co-founded the firm in 2012 with a lawyer named Bill Hancock, who was a longtime research attorney on the Court of Appeal, had left the Court of Appeal, had worked at Horvitz and Levy, had a partnership with John Eisenberg, who of course is a legend in the California Pellet Bar. they were had a two-person partnership. in San Francisco, and were really the only Appellate specialty boutique in San Francisco. I had met Bill fairly early in my career. I'll give you a little bit of background about myself because it sort of leads into sort of how we set up the firm and the way we did. I went to law school at Northwestern and growing up on the East Coast and had always sort of planned to go back to the East Coast. I was gonna Practice in Washington, D.C. That's where sort of a lot of smart, East Coast lawyers want to practice. And I had I had been a summer associate at a firm called Williams and Connolly in Washington, DC, which is sort of a storied historical firm, had a had a really wonderful experience. But I'd started dating a girl in law school. And, all stories go, sideways when you know you started dating a girl. And she was had gone to art school in San Francisco, and it was very San Francisco. She tattoos and piercings. And she came and visited me during my summer in Washington, and they did not know what to do with her. That was not the way Washington, DC worked, especially twenty or so years ago. it was a real southern town. I think she went to the bathroom once and they had someone follow her to make sure she didn't steal something because they didn't they didn't know what to do. And she really hated it. So she convinced me in my third year of law school to consider, I was sort of putting my clerkship application together, to consider just taking, looking at San Francisco. I had never been to San Francisco at the time. And so I said sure, her. I was sure I'd still go back to DC, but I'd humor her and come out in San Francisco. And it was, I think February. When I I'd sort of sent some applications on a lark, took a free trip out. And Chicago in February, if you've ever been to Chicago, it's really not the nicest place in the winter. It's

Tim Kowal Mm-hmm.

Ben Feuer very cold, windy, snowy, absolutely miserable. And I came to San Francisco and it was like maybe 50 degrees, and there was this these beautiful buildings, the water, the bay. And I describe it as the only time in my life I've experienced love at first sight. So I completely fell in love with San Francisco. changed everything I was doing, put my clerkship applications on pause just to take a job in San Francisco. I took a job with Quinn Emanuel. I sort of I had a perfectly fine, great, good experience, met really, smart people, but I'd restarted my clerkship. I had always wanted to clerk, and I'd restarted my clerkship applications almost immediately and fortunately got hired by Judge Bea. So I had like one year at Quinn. Was sort of working with the appellate folks. Kathleen Sullivan was still out there. Dan Bromberg, who's now a justice on the I think the Sixth District Court of Appeal was working there, some other really great appellate lawyers. but then I went and clerked on the Ninth Circuit. And coming out of the Ninth Circuit, where I had a very intense but incredibly sort of enlightening and educational experience. I've learned more probably during that clerkship. Than at any other point in my career. I didn't want to go back to a large law firm. So I went to a small, little three person law firm in San Francisco. They never had an associate. They did some really weird work. The guy who headed this firm was his name was Terry Gross, the same as the woman on NPR. And he had been an unindicted co conspirator to the Chicago 7 during the 68 convention, because he was the head of SDS. He had been a founder of Burning Man. He represented the communist governments. He had an interesting practice, but it wasn't really appellate. And that is what I kind of had always wanted to do. And so I worked there for a little bit. In 2010, I decided, four years out of law school, with no clients whatsoever, that I was going to start my own appellate practice. Absolutely crazy idea. People tell me today that hey, I'm Four years out of law school, have no clients and want to start my own appellate practice. Do you think it's a good idea? I would say, no, it's a terrible idea, even though it worked out very well for me. while I was working with this small law firm, a guy had subleased one of their offices, this guy, Bill Hancock. And he and John Eisenberg had this two person firm, Eisenberg and Hancock. It was the only appellate specialty boutique in San Francisco. There were a couple of appellate practices with big firms, but otherwise the appellate firms were in Los Angeles. And I wasn't going to move to Los Angeles. That was sort of a non-starter. I mean, I love Los Angeles. It's a wonderful city, but wasn't where I wanted to live. The so I'd kind of gotten to know this guy, Bill Hancock, and we were both kind of appellate nerds, and we really, got along well. and so when I went out with no clients. And really no business starting my own appellate practice. I got my first referral from Bill and John. and I was like so thrilled to get it because I think I made $60,000 my first year. It was sort of barely enough to survive. And certainly today, I mean in San Francisco, I think you'd be in poverty.

Tim Kowal That's right.

Ben Feuer that's absolutely right. And they like, they offered to sort of look at my brief and offer comments, which I was happy to do. And they liked my writing so much they asked if Be of counsel to their firm. And I that was I was over the moon, like absolutely please, John is brilliant, Bill was brilliant. in 2012, they decided to go their separate ways for their own reasons. And Bill and I still wanted to practice sort of business and civil appellate work, appellate law in San Francisco. And so he and I sat down and sort of started thinking about how we might set up a firm that could do things better. he had worked for quite a while at Horvitz and Levy, and he had an okay experience there, but he didn't want he wanted his the firm that he was gonna start to do some things very differently. and and Horvitz and Levy, of course, is a is a great firm, and they do things their very specific way, and it's very successful for them. Bill thought there were ways that we might be able to do things a little differently, maybe a little better. And in 2012, that was a really interesting time in San Francisco. That was sort of the beginning of the sort of second dot-com internet wave, right? Google and Apple and all of these companies were sort of, Facebook, now Meta, and all of these other big and small companies had sort of to Grown up and were developing in San Francisco. And there was this idea that we would that you were thinking about how to do things differently. Think different was a sort of big Apple ad around that time. And also, sort of in the same vein, there was this recession in tw 2007 that hit the legal community really hard. I don't know if you remember that. In 2008, there was a day when Latham and Watkins fired. fifty percent of their associates. No one was hiring anyone. And so really

Tim Kowal I graduated law school in two thousand seven, so I remember that that difficulty well. Yeah.

Ben Feuer you were right in the middle that. I was 2006. I was 2006. So I was a year ahead. So I sort of I sort of skipped that misery, right? Getting caught up in that misery. But there were, I mean, there were there were terrible stories. I knew lawyers from, who are sort of Ninth Circuit clerks and had gone to top law schools who were doing document review because they needed to pay the bills and they needed to pay their loans, but no one was hiring. and I mean, that was really tough time in the legal world. So by 2012, the legal industry was finally kind of coming out of that, but we still knew a lot of really unhappy lawyers. And they were unhappy either because they were still kind of underemployed, hadn't really found a job that brought them back to kind of where they had hoped to be, or they had jobs and they were so still so terrified of losing them that they were working. unbelievably hard and under a lot of pressure and hadn't had a raise in at all, and they were just happy to begin with a paycheck. So we knew all of these unhappy lawyers, we were sort of thinking about how to do things differently to begin with. And in setting up an appellate firm, that kind of gave us additional flexibility. Because appellate work doesn't need a lot of the sort of superstructure that trial work does, right? You're not you don't need conference room space for depositions at the very least, right? You don't need people to be responding to ex parte applications within a day. you have a lot more flexibility.

Tim Kowal Yeah, You don't you don't need those very sophisticated document management systems to to parse through all of your PDFs and to track whether they're all confidential and to base number them and to track in what tranch were they produced. this was

Ben Feuer my god.

Tim Kowal set forty seven of the request for production of documents. yeah, so you don't need all that

Ben Feuer Yeah, no, I

Tim Kowal superstructure as you were saying.

Ben Feuer right, exactly. You're not doing discovery, you're not doing trials, which of course need their own kind of, paralegal army and kind of teams and hotels and so forth. You're doing something differently. So we sort of sat back and said, look, if we're building this law firm from scratch and we're thinking from the ground up, how could we do things in a way that will be successful, that will keep the lawyers who are involved. Maybe happy, avoid kind of the burnout issues we have. What is it that works and doesn't work in the industry? Why are so many lawyers unhappy? And we ultimately came to the conclusion that so many lawyers were unhappy because they had to work so hard, right? I mean, at a I'd worked for Quin Emanuel, 200 hours a month was billed, was fairly normal at a firm like that. And many big law firms have sort of significant hourly requirements, even small firms have. Quite high significant, significantly substantial hourly requirements. and there's a lot of stress, there's a lot of exhaustion that comes with all of that. So we sort of said, okay, why do law firms require the lawyers to work so hard? And what we concluded was that law firms have very high fixed costs, they take on a lot of risk. and so in order to pay very high salaries to lawyers. to cover the high costs of real estate, to take on the risks of cases that come in or don't come in or settle or they have issues with clients. They needed to sort of force the lawyers to work really, hard to earn money on leverage. And the firm, that that's how law firms work. That's how the industry works. And that has only grown in the, for most of the industry in the past, 20 years or what is that, I guess, maybe 15 years since we set up the firm. especially as in the big law world, sort of poaching partners has become sort of such a normal thing to do. And so law firms need to be able to offer these $80 million pay packages for three years of commitment. they need to make all of this huge amount of money and they do it on the backs of everyone else, working super, hard.

Tim Kowal Model you're describing is often referred to as the pyramid model with the

Ben Feuer You're middle.

Tim Kowal with the with the senior partner on top and then the mid-level partners below that kind of driving or overseeing the work or putting hands on the work and then the senior associates or juniors junior partners below that, and then all the junior associates churning away on the file below that, producing all of the actual work under the oversight, and then under further. 30,000 foot oversight, and then at the very top, who knows? someone who's maybe just the named partner or the rainmaker. but that's the traditional model for how a firm works. And there's some there's certainly some benefits to it, but CALG has a little bit more of a flattened or much more flattened model. And actually I actually wanted to just get out a little bit of recent CALG news. and this is also, I guess, California Appellate Law Podcast news because Susan Gelmus has just joined the firm as the 28th lawyer. Susan Gelmus is an alumna of California Appellate Law Podcast. She appeared three years ago now. she was the longtime chief deputy clerk of the Ninth Circuit and an editor of the Ninth Circuit Rudder Guide. so does Susan does CALG hiring Susan Gelmus tend to illustrate Calg's recruitment approach? this is a Susan, presumably an excellent attorney, knows the ins and outs of of ninth circuit practice, but does probably doesn't have a book of business.

Ben Feuer Totally different model. Yeah, I mean, so that that's exactly right. So as we were looking, as Bill and I were kind of looking at the industry and looking at how to set up a law firm, we also sort of said to ourselves, gosh, it seems like there is a lot of talent out there that is being underutilized. People who don't want to work in a firm that's required, the miserable lawyers who are working in a law firm at 2,400 hours a year, and then a lot of people who don't have no interest whatsoever who you know were working, to of working in a law firm. Right. a lot a lot of women in particular. I mean, CALG is 70% female or 65% female, I think, today. And that's not sort of that we started off saying, we're gonna have a very heavily female firm, and sort of that in itself was the end. But we set up this model, which I'll sort of talk about a little bit, that it we saw that there was all of this talent. I mean, in my law school class, there were three Supreme Court clerks. All of whom are women, the editor-in-chief of the law review is a woman. And then you kind of look at the partnership roles of large firms, and they're like 80% male. Why does that happen? Why do all of these incredibly talented people leave the practice? What about people like Susan Gelmis, or like many, a number of our other lawyers who are career research attorneys at the California Court of Appeal, who might retire at 62? But you know what? When you turn 62, a lot of people aren't just sort of ready to go out and I don't know, die or whatever it is that you know people live into their 90s. I mean, judge Carlos Beach, we mentioned, he's 93. And honestly, he's as sharp today, I think, as he was when I clerked for him. and he's still working on the ninth circuit. He's a senior judge, but he takes a fairly significant caseload. So when we were sort of setting up this f the firm, we said, look, what if we take away the things that traditional law firms do that create this cost, this fixed cost and this risk for them. What if, for example, especially with appellate lawyers, what if we say, look, we're gonna have offices, we'll have a conference room to meet with clients, we'll have sort of a floater office or two for lawyers who happen to be in the downtown part of a city. But we're gonna tell the appellate lawyers who really only need a laptop in order to do their work that they can work from wherever they want. Now, this is remember. Eight years before COVID. So people were not generally working wherever they want. But we said, look, we're gonna say you don't have to commute into an office every day in order to sit at a desk to type. You could do that from your study at home, from a cafe, from the beach, at least for the folks in Southern California. And the other thing, I mean, the real innovation that we s we thought of is, look, instead of saying we're gonna pay you this very high fixed salary and we're gonna make money on you. By making you work so hard that we're gonna make three, four, five times your salary for the firm, we're gonna pay you as a percentage. It's gonna be a much more generous percentage than you're gonna get for your time at any other firm. We're gonna pay you two or three times what you would make at another firm per hour, but we're not gonna guarantee the hour. and in the early days of the firm, that was a big risk because the firm was just starting out. Nowadays, the firm is very busy and so it's I mean it's still the way we do things, but we have never had anyone leave the firm because they weren't making enough money. Let's put it that way.

Tim Kowal That's interesting. How did you land on the percentage and have you had to adjust it over time?

Ben Feuer Very carefully. No, we in a way we I would say we got lucky, but we came up with this sort of complex formula that we still use today. It has worked out really fabulously well. the lawyers are happy, the firm is successful. maybe the managers of the firm make like my myself maybe make less than I might if I had a traditional firm that had twenty. Eight lawyers sort of working under me and I'm making leverage and sort of sticking all the money in my ears, but I do just fine. And the sort of stress level and happiness, we've never had a partner leave to go practice at another firm. I'm a hard time thinking if we've had any lawyers leave to go practice at other firms. Some people have gone to government, we have one person become a judge. but for the most, but the firm has been just very successful. People have been very happy. So we so we started this firm in 2012. And another thing, and to go back to kind of what started this part of the conversation, is when we were thinking of how to name the firm, we thought, we can call it Hancock and Feuer or Fewer or whatever people

Tim Kowal Ha

Ben Feuer to say. Right, we could, we could a lot of different ways you could name it. But we said, look, we're coming into a market where there are incumbent competitors that people know. right, Horvitz and Granis Martin have been around for 40 or 50 years, big firms have been around for a long time, people know them. Why do we need, I don't have enough of an ego that I need my name on the door. And why not skip the step where people say, Feuer, what do they do? Feuer and whoever, what do they do? Why not just tell folks what we do? And another upside to that is why not let the lawyers and the firm kind of be able to be proud of where they work. Because they're part of the group with whom they work, not because they're associated with me. So we came up the way we actually started the first name of our firm was the California Appellate Law Group, which I think is an appropriate name to them. I'm on the California Appellate Law podcast, right?

Tim Kowal That's right.

Ben Feuer And then, and the firm continu as the firm continued to grow, it was very successful. Around the right before COVID, we started appearing more and more outside of California. And we realize, what, you can't appear in Texas state court if the name of your firm is the California Appellate Law Group. You will lose. No matter what you're

Jeffrey Lewis Yeah.

Ben Feuer you will lose immediately before they've even looked at your brief, you have lost.

Tim Kowal No, our attempt to expand into the Texas appellate podcast market crashed and burned very quickly.

Jeffrey Lewis Ha

Ben Feuer might need a new name, maybe a new hat, possibly a twang. but we went through the lengthy and quite cumbersome process of changing the firm name. We kept CALG, we kept the acronym, but we changed the firm name to the Complex Appellate Litigation Group. And that has been it also really more accurately describes our practice, which is sort of complex appellate litigation. our yeah.

Tim Kowal let me let me read off a handful of some of the names of the attorneys at Complex Appellate Litigation Group, because I think they fall into a couple of different categories. some a little bit more traditional, like who you would expect, like another Calp alumna, MC Sungaila. Brian Sutherland was a a re Reed Smith appellate partner, Steve Hirsch was a partner at Kiker or Kaker.

Ben Feuer K Kegger and Van Nest, which

Tim Kowal Checker.

Ben Feuer is sort of the probably the best trial boutique in San Francisco. He was their appellate lawyer.

Tim Kowal And Rex Heinke co-headed Aiken Gump, Supreme Court, and appellate practice from 2001 to 2020. But alongside those types of players who are very experienced, very able appellate litigators, you have Greg Wolf, who spent about 27 years inside the California Supreme Court. Sharon Baumgold, nearly 40 years as a writs attorney in the second district, California Court of Appeal, Susan Horst, three decades as the writ attorney in the first district. Melanie Gold, three decades as a research attorney across the Fourth District Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court. James Heideman, also at the California Supreme Court, Margaret Bielak, Matt Stuckey, former Justice Pat Benke, 35 years on the California Court of Appeal. So you have a lot of those types of of very able attorneys who were inside the institution, inside the actual Courts, similar to Susan Gilmus, very able to know the court procedures, what kind of motions are gonna get granted, what kind of briefs are gonna land well, but they're probably not coming right out of the court of appeal with a big book of business. but they can come to CALG. Yeah.

Ben Feuer Yeah, or any business where we have any ability or desire necessarily to generate business. Yeah, and this is one of the ways that our sort of unique model has been so successful because we pair lawyers as a percentage, very generous percentage, but as a percentage, we can have lawyers who decide it's a very flexible firm. It can be sort of a different firm for different people depending on what their goals are. So we have people. that you mentioned you all you also you didn't mention Anne Rose Mathson who was a US Supreme Court clerk had been at O'Melvanie in Myers for a long time, Dina Mishra who's a was also a former US Supreme Court clerk. so the there were a number of people who are sort of Kelly Woodruff who's a sort of well known appellate lawyer in San Francisco, who have who are full-time appell lawyers who generate business, who work on appeals, who argue appeals, who do all of the things you might expect, who work a sort of a full caseload, although no one is billing 2,000 hours a year, they are still making more money than they would in traditional law firms. And there's one of the things that's really incredible about our firm is our lawyers are making in most cases, many cases, as much or more money than they were. I mean I've had sell let me put it this way, I've had several of our lawyers who came over as sort of from big law firms as partners and so forth who have told me they're working half as much and making as much or more money than they were at their big law firm with our firm. That's just how generous the our approach is. But leaving that aside, the for the for those folks who want to sort of work hard and generate business and handle cases, we can sort of do that for them and it's very successful. For the folks who are coming out of the court, they're sort of they've reached an age of retirement or they've just kind of spent their time at the court and they're ready to move on to the next thing and they sort of want to do something a little more flexibly. Well, first, they could work quite a lot on the cases that the rest of the lawyers of the firm are generating. We have at least two lawyers on every appeal. in some cases, we may have four or five lawyers if the appeal is substantial enough. And but some folks just want to kind of consult a little bit, they want to keep one sort of toe in the pond. They're not ready to give up all of these decades of institutional knowledge they have about the courts in which they work, the practices, the practice of appellate work in the state or federal courts. And our firm can do that. We have a way of sort of easily and sort of naturally integrating them into the practice. And giving them the ability to do what they want with their practice and with their lives, and having that openness. We have some lawyers, for example, who want to do law school clinics. MC Sungaila, who you mentioned, she gets a lot of reward from heading up the Loyola Law School Appellate Clinic, which I know that she emotional reward, spiritual reward, not

Tim Kowal Wait.

Ben Feuer pecuniary reward. I should I should Obviously, maybe that's obvious. MC also has a passion for space law and has recently developed gotten a master's in space law because it interests her so much and she goes to kind of international conferences on space law. She's we give our lawyers the ability to kind of have these private passions to ri to raise their kids and see their kids, which we all know many lawyers in traditional firms get to do that a lot less maybe than they would like. To travel. We have one lawyer who has a pieta terra in Barcelona and spends three or four months a year in Barcelona and is able to do that totally naturally, continue working on cases or take some time off. It's totally up to the lawyers what they want to do, how much they want to work. I mean, we have to obviously make sure that cases that everyone is working on are covered and taken care of, but we give the lawyers a lot more flexibility, and that allows us to bring in all of this just tremendous experience. You mentioned Pat Benke, who of course is 35 years as a justice on the Court of Appeal. I'm not sure any of our competitors have anything like that they can kind of offer to clients. But Pat isn't sitting down and writing briefs, of course, right? I mean, I, having worked with and know many judge judges and justices. That's really not what they do on the court, right? They have clerks to do that. But she she's able to bring to bear her perspective, her experience, no, knowing her colleagues, and how she would see an issue. And we've had very complex and sophisticated appeals where we're, for example, deciding which of maybe 15 possible issues we want to raise, which four or five can we actually raise in this brief and that have a chance. Where she we we've had her look at that and sort of and she said, Hey, there's this issue here that you're not focused on, but this would grab me. This would be the kind of thing that I might reverse on. And we've taken that advice and sort of incorporated those thoughts into our approach. And it's just incredibly valuable. But she's not gonna go to a firm where she's expected to work 2,000 hours a year. A firm's not gonna know what to do with her. So this is one of the ways that our Sort of unusual model really gives us the ability to bring a different kind of experience to bear for our clients.

Tim Kowal Now let me try to poke a hole in your model here, because you've got

Ben Feuer no.

Tim Kowal you've got no you've got no bottom tier of the pyramid, so to speak. There's no associates,

Ben Feuer Right. Very, purposeful.

Tim Kowal no, associates. So what happens when say Justice Pat Benke needs a research memo on some kind of just research point that needs it's gonna be maybe the foundation of the architecture for the brief that she would like to draft up. who does she assign that to? Does she have anyone at CALG that she can assign? research projects or, assistant, or I need a first draft of this brief.

Ben Feuer yeah, and when we wouldn't ask her to stare at a blank page and draft. The no, the and but you sort of hit on it a minute ago, right? We have all of these former research attorneys who she may have even worked with directly or who have worked with justices for much of their career, and many other sort of lawyers who are sort of appellate lawyers in the firm who maybe weren't career research attorneys or law clerks who have maybe aren't. Business generating appellate lawyers. We sort of have multiple types, different types of appellate lawyers in the firm. I mean, there are many folks who are tremendously talented writers and thinkers and appellate experienced appellate lawyers who are not really interested in or maybe are kind of the type of introverted personality where business generation is not. what they're looking to do. Right. And we know appellate lawyers. Lots of them have bow ties and like to sit in front of a desk and type. And there are sort of a few out there who maybe are a little more extroverted. I tend to be a more extroverted type, but there are there are so many talented appellate lawyers who are not like that. And so in a practice like ours, that balance sort of comes very naturally. We have the people who Sort have the careers in the courts, but we also have people who have sort of careers in practice, but never really were or became business generation generating lawyers. Fortunately, we have many lawyers in the firm who do nothing but, in some cases, generate business and have lots of connections and are very good at that sort of talent. And we can put those folks together. Pat. for example, got a call from a large corporate client the other day and who sort of had a matter in San Diego where she's based and wanted her to work on it. She put them in touch with me. I sort of arranged and in the process of arranging that retention. And if that client joins the firm, Pat will certainly offer input on their case, but we will have one or two other appellate lawyers also working on. that case. And this is a situation where Pat actually generated the work. and Pat will get sort of a terrific generation credit for that because that's how sort of our firm works and our formula kind of takes all of that into account. So the There are some folks at some firms who really like the idea and the process of training the next generation. And I appreciate that they're doing that. When those folks sort of are trained and they're sort of ready to make more money, work less on really interesting cases, we'll be happy to chat with them.

Tim Kowal And just because an experienced appellate attorney has decades of experience doesn't mean that they don't like doing the research and puzzling out those those issues. That we might farm

Ben Feuer Right. Absolutely.

Tim Kowal out to a junior associate. Sometimes appropriately, you it's sometimes the project is appropriate for a junior assistant. Sometimes it may be way too ambitious for the junior assistant. But I won't

Ben Feuer Yeah, and of the things our clients really like, one of the things we tell our clients, and we bring, we explain to them, and one of the reasons I think many of our clients hire us is we don't have junior associates in the pyramid system that you described earlier on, and who are learning as they go at the client's expense, writing a draft of something that then a junior associate writes it and then a mid-level associate rewrites it, then a senior associate rewrites it, and then a junior partner rewrites it, and the client is billed for all of that time. We don't have anything like that. The person doing the first draft is gonna be a lawyer who has at the minimum ten years of appellate experience and in many cases has decades of appellate experience.

Tim Kowal I wanted to to turn the conversation to AI and how CALG sees and uses AI. the flip side of the coin with junior associates is a lot of us, and maybe you as well, is I mean, all attorneys fear for the next generation of attorneys. How are they going to get the experience writing briefs and doing all these low-level research projects when it can be done autom automatically through AI? You could, I pump a lot of my projects now through Claude, which is connected to Westlaw Co-Council, so I can just generate instant research memos without leaving my AI chat box. It's pretty amazing. But I worry how what projects I would give to a to a first-year attorney. I I'm not sure how I would puzzle that out, but we do have standards within our firm about how to, when we should and should not use AI because there is every one of your partners and attorneys at CALG are, have decades of experience working in s well, both inside and outside the institution, the actual courts. But do you feel the need for CALG to have an AI policy or just let each experienced attorney on your roster decide for themselves?

Ben Feuer yeah, we have a very carefully sort of designed AI policy. I think you'd be crazy as a lawyer today to not have an AI policy in a if you're a serious firm. I mean, even if you're not a serious firm. I mean, the what, 2,500 sanctions

Jeffrey Lewis Ha

Ben Feuer orders have been issued. I mean, it's a mess. I mean, it's really in some ways, just kind of as an aside, I find it really depressing just as a member of the profession to see how much laziness there is out there with these lawyers who just sort of turn. their entire process of whatever they're doing as lawyer over to the AI don't check these the cases that the AI

Jeffrey Lewis Yeah, but the laziness isn't new. It's always was there except those lawyers were using paralegals before or other stuff to drive.

Ben Feuer Well where do the paralegals go? We use paralegals of do we check everything? We check everything at least twice. I mean there was a time I guess. I mean this is not well, I will get to your question, Tim. Absolutely, but there's a time, I guess, when if a lawyer kind of cited a case wrong or poorly, you'd say, that guy's not a very or woman is not a very good lawyer. They just aren't good at what they do. Now they cite something incorrectly and it's 'cause they just kind of gave it over to AI and didn't double check it. I mean it just I it may maybe it's because all of these lawyers are so over busy that they can't, check things. I mean, some very, big firms like Sullivan Cromwell and Boies Schiller that have gotten caught up in these sort of fake citation issues. And maybe the junior associate involved is just so overwhelmed with their 2400, 2600, 3,000 hour a year, Expectations as they try to make partner in this kind of crazy pyramid model. But the bulk of these AI sanctions cases are sort of small firms and solo practitioners who are just kind of turning the whole thing over. And I just find it, as a member of the profession, just a little depressing to see that level of laziness. it's like folks just check. Just chat, just read the case, right? Just come on, just go read the case. so anyway, to answer your question, there were kind of a few parts to that. Sort of how do we approach AI? How does AI sort of affect the future? I mean, at the outset, of course, obviously none of us know how AI is gonna affect the future. If you believe this guy who just quit anthropic the other day, we're all gonna be dead in 10 years. So we don't have to worry about who is gonna tell who's gonna be in the next generation of lawyers. Because AI is gonna kill us all. and I hope not. that would be a real bummer. There probably isn't very much I can do about it, but that would be a shame. I sure hope he's wrong. the

Tim Kowal Well.

Ben Feuer assuming he is wrong, and we are just sort of trucking along. I don't know if you saw the by the way, the Dallas Fed issued sort of a 10-year, maybe it was a 15-year GDP estimate. and they had a chart, and what made this chart incredible is that it had, GDP overall has grown at about 0.3% every year since I think the 1970s or something like that on average. And so it had this chart that sort of showed this sort of slow three, 0.3% progression every year. pat the past is indicative of the future. But then it had two alternative lines on this graph. One where the line was just shooting straight up, AI. kind of changes the world and everyone becomes unbelievably wealthy and it creates so much wealth you can't

Jeffrey Lewis Yeah.

Ben Feuer believe it. And then the other was totally to the bottom, doom and destruction. So even the Dallas Fed doesn't know what the future is gonna bring with due to AI. assuming that it just sort of is on that steady path and it doesn't bring us either to utopia or destruction. the challenges that you identify, right? I mean, how does AI, how does the future of the profession grow if AI is taking away some of the tasks that young lawyers do that lead them to learn how to be sort of more experienced lawyers? How do they get that experience? That that's not specific, of course, to our practice or any specific practice, right? That that's a An issue throughout the profession and throughout many professions. and I think that things will sort of develop the way that they'll develop. I think junior, younger, them there may be far fewer lawyers who are practicing law, but that the junior lawyers will be doing other things besides maybe research memos or scouring Westlaw the way that they might do today. I will say we have tested AIs extensively and carefully. And we use AIs in certain ways. We have a very carefully crafted AI policy. But I will say, maybe there was a point, I would say about a year ago, year and a half ago, when I kind of had like a moment of panic, we're all going to be out of business. AIs can come in, it what does it do? It research, it's rights. What do we do? We research, we write.

Tim Kowal Mm-hmm.

Ben Feuer And so we sort of started really seriously testing some of the leading AI. For the legally oriented, I mean Harvey, Lagora, there were couple, there's one called case brief, maybe I can't. There were several that we tested. and I think what we came out of that with was kind of well, let's just say I was very reassured at the end of that testing period, because it turned out that the AIs could not do almost anything that I had hoped that they could do, at least in a and that's really the key thing. Well, ours is one of the only professions I can think of, one of the only fields in the world where there is actually an outside person checking what you do, and you get in trouble if you aren't a hundred percent scrupulously accurate, right? in politics, nobody's CNN is checking, but then no, you know, then you just say, fake CNN. In medicine, maybe you make a mistake. Dead or so, or whatever it might be. there's but there's the and maybe there's a lawsuit over it. But in our field, right, we are taking our whether you're at the appellate stage or at a different stage, you're taking what you do and you're most of the time you're presenting it to a judge who is going to sit there and with their assistants go through everything you're saying, make sure that it's supported by the evidence that we hope at least, supported by the evidence that you've submitted. accurately describing the cases that you've cited. And if you don't get that right, you lose or even worse, you or maybe not even worse, but equally problematic, you get into trouble. you get sanctioned, you get sort of yelled at, you lose credibility. I mean all of these things. Most professions don't have that. and what we found is that I'll give an example. we I think when we were doing some of this testing, we Would we uploaded we a transcript to one of the or all of them, I think we would upload a transcript as part of our testing. And we'd say, give me all of the examples in the in this transcript or all the points in this transcript where an expert witness testified about, damages or whatever it might be. And we would get back these reports from AI and it would have maybe six items on it where the expert witness testified about damages. And we'd then go check each one. And five of them were right. The expert testified about damage there. And then the sixth one looked like what the expert witness might have said or would have said. It was sort of well crafted. It was what we wanted the expert to say. It was in the expert's way of speaking. It looked like it's part of the transcript. But if you go to that page of the transcript, it's not there. The AI hallucinated that.

Tim Kowal You said you put this into multiple platforms. Did they did they all hallucinate in the same

Ben Feuer Yes, a number of different platforms.

Tim Kowal way?

Ben Feuer They I mean they would hallucinate in different ways, but we and in sort of different transcripts or in different case laws. But what we found was that it was not reliable. and the problem with one failure of reliability is that you can't trust it at all. You have to go back and redo the entire thing because it might have hallucinated something and created something new, or it might have it might have missed something. and so that's gonna be a major problem for how AI could be useful. So we've

Tim Kowal One response to that or one possible resolution to that is in braiding. if you're gonna use one AI system to do the initial pass, analyze all five passages of what the expert talked about, or and and come back with a conclusion and it winds up hallucinating one. And if you take the same prompt and give it to another, if you do that one in Claude, say, and you do the other one in Chat GPT, and then you compare them together, And Claude will say, I read Chat GPT's response and it was right. I misinterpreted this other passage. And so I think you can get a lot of the way toward getting to that a more satisfactory level of confidence by using braiding.

Ben Feuer Yeah, I mean we we've sort of used AIs to kind of compare against each other and see which AIs what one AI thinks about another and but and that does help. That absolutely increases reliability. and so we use AI. I'm not suggesting that we don't use AI, but we're very cautious about

Tim Kowal yeah.

Ben Feuer how we use AI. We're very careful about it. We have a very detailed Kind of a policy that circumscribes how AI can be used and in what way. We don't use AI to generate text at all. We don't use AI to, well, we permit the use of AI to conduct research, but every case must be read both by a lawyer and by one of our parallel staff. And one of the things that's sort of very helpful in our in our firm and our practice is we have number now seven eight appellate specific specifically appellate trained paralegals who really do which is totally different from what paralegals do at the trial court level right and it's really different and I think other than one or two we have trained essentially from the ground up in appellate work it's a time consuming expensive task but they're

Tim Kowal By the way, had d do you have a curriculum developed for training appellate paralegals? 'Cause that w I I've had to my paralegal and I have had to do that ourselves 'cause there is no paral appellate paralegal curriculum that exists out there that we've found.

Ben Feuer Yeah. You can't there's no right, and it's very higher. Even if you hire sort of an experienced paralegal, there are almost always gonna be paralegals who are trial court paralegals or working for a trial firm. And what they're doing for an appellate firm is totally different. So I don't know that we have it, we haven't called it a p a curriculum yet, but we do have sort of a guide that we sort of take new paralegals through. And I mean it probably takes a year to train a new paralegal to the level that we're comfortable letting them sort of do things without oversight.

Tim Kowal And do the do the trained or your senior paralegals train the new paralegals?

Ben Feuer That's exactly right. And when I say without oversight, from the senior paralegals, the lawyers are of course overseeing everything. So we have, so we use AI, we also we like Claude, we use Copilot, we sort of, are always re-evaluating which AI system we want to use and which AI system we think is best, especially for our practice. but we are very careful about it, and at least at this stage, With the kind of com very complicated, sophisticated cases that we take on. I have not we use AI, but I don't see AI being anywhere near sort of a place where we can hand off significant tasks to the AI and trust that it's gonna do a good enough job that we're gonna be comfortable with letting it kind of even do kind of a first round of things. I do find it, we do find it very useful, I will say, once the brief is sort of already written or drafted, right? And we can take our sort of draft brief, we can say, look, here's the order below, here's our draft brief. Do you see anything else? And what I found is that, the AI may come up with like eight ideas. Seven of them might not be good ones or ones that we considered and rejected, but one of them might be might be useful, might be a good idea. And that one, that's worth it, right? For that one idea. Or before oral argument. Very useful to take sort of all of the briefs, sort of plug it in and say, hey, what are some of the questions? Pretend you're a an appellate judge or justice. What are some of the questions you might have? Now, what we have found is that it's useful, but much, less useful than having humans do a moot. right, not because of the our lawyers are all sort of very experienced. It's not the practice of arguing. It's the ideas that hum that humans come up with, the lateral thinking. the analogies that the humans, come up with, that the AI is sort of nowhere near that.

Tim Kowal Oral argument preparation is one of my favorite use cases for AI. But the last couple

Ben Feuer Yeah, for sure.

Tim Kowal of oral arguments that I've attended, I set up my Claude to do a murder board for me and just ask me questions. And then on the way I would just it would it would give me the question, as if from a panel member, and then I would dictate my response back to it, and then it would grade my response and tell me what I did well and what I should make sure to weave into the response for the next time, and just did that all the way up to LA. So that really helped. Build the confidence level. and

Ben Feuer Yeah.

Tim Kowal I was not doing not doing it just the day before, but I was doing it up to and including the day of the the oral argument.

Ben Feuer Yeah, I mean I the place where I see AI probably growing or where the area the place where I see AI probably having in some ways the most immediate impact, I suspect, is law and motion judges. and it sort of varies from court to court. The superior courts are sort of permitting in the California are permitting use of AI. In the federal courts, it's actually looking like the court the rules that are developing are going to prohibit judges, district judges from using AI in significant ways. There was a Fifth Circuit case recently, just last week I think, where they potentially may change, may order a different district judge assigned to a case because it appears that AI was used in the district judge's sort of opinion and analysis. But in California they're taking a little bit of a different approach. The rules seem to permit superior court judges to use AI without Great deal of sort of limitation and oversight. We'll see how that develops. But I could certainly imagine really overworked law and motion judges just almost completely relying on AI, sort of feeding in the two, motion, the motion and the opposition, and saying, AI, what do you think? Draft an opposition or an order, I'm sorry. And then maybe the judge reviews that. look, if AI gets things wrong. Just gonna keep us appellate lawyers in business. Happy to have that happen. Probably will not do as good of a job as when the judge tells the prevailing party to draft an order, because then the prevailing party is going to appellate, make the order as appellate-proof as possible. the AI may not think of that if the AI thinks at all. but that's one area where I could see AI being used a lot. We had a case, we had an appeal once in superior court in one of the small the appeal wasn't we were brought in as consults one of the that we do a lot of obviously appeals and writs but we also do a lot of trial court consulting obviously helping trial lawyers and setting up things for appeal but also sort of helping them just sort of get through the trial court process and we had a consulting engagement up in one of the small town superior courts and they were sort of a big out-of-town corporation, out of California corporation. And they had their out of California trial lawyers who were sort of submitting all of these motions. And at one point the judge said, look, I don't have a research attorney. I don't have a law clerk. I'm doing this myself. I do not have time to read this 70 page motion and, attachments. I just don't have time. Now that's not a good thing.

Tim Kowal Okay.

Ben Feuer this judge was not the best judge I've ever seen, let's put it that way. But I could absolutely see imagine that judge with access to AI, sort of plugging it into AI and issuing an order based on what AI says. And look, I don't know whether it would be that's better or worse than the judge saying, hey, I don't have time to read this motion denied. Right? Maybe it's better to have AI give an answer,

Tim Kowal Yeah.

Ben Feuer even if it's not a very Good answer than have the judge say, Hey, hands up, I can't do it. but that is an area where I could see AI really having an impact in the

Tim Kowal Yeah. Yeah, I've I started wondering things after the family violence appellate panel decision last month, allowing or actually r requiring courts in California to electronically record hearings for on behalf of indigent litigants if there is not a court reporter available. And the the rationale for that rule is a is a common law doctrine to provide equal access to indigent litigants. And I thought, well That's interesting. And I and I never did like the rule the prohibition against recording, but that common law doctrine isn't limited to microphones. and it would empower or possibly even compel superior courts to utilize other available technology where failure to do so would result in a equal protect or equal access problem, such as interpreters would be seems like the first domino to fall if there's not a certified interpreter available in that particular language and or the litigant can't afford one and can't maybe can't get a fee waiver. That's one of the other interesting aspects of that decision is that it's not required to be actually indigent, just unable to afford that particular service. AI

Jeffrey Lewis Yeah.

Tim Kowal interp interpreters would be available to fill the bill, potentially.

Jeffrey Lewis Yeah. I've got two AI stories for you in that regard from the trial court hearing on an anti SLAPP motion. sometimes I slum down in the trial court hearing anti SLAPPs

Tim Kowal Yeah.

Jeffrey Lewis And I had a judge tell a party preemptively, not an improper, not a particularly impoverished party, say, Hey, there's no court reporter here. Would you like me to flip the switch before you argue and press the magic button and turn on the recorder? Because the Supreme Court tells me I have to. And by the way, the lawyer on the other side said, no, that's okay, Your Honor. and he lost the motion. But that's but you're seeing all trial judges do all sorts of crazy things with the California Supreme Court's decision there, beyond I think what the Supreme Court intended. That's one, and then two A fee motion on an anti SLAPP, is load star, what is a reasonable rate, yada A trial judge on a fee motion I was hearing was raised the issue of well, lawyers can use AI now to generate a an anti SLAPP and this fee motion, so maybe I should downwardly adjust this hourly number for w how long it took you to do a fee motion. And so this AI effect isn't, months from now, years from now, it is already impacting how trial judges are ruling on motions and the Court of Appeal is gonna have to jump in on some of these things.

Ben Feuer Yeah, and I suspect they will. I mean, there was a very interesting Court of Appeal decision, what about a week ago, that I'm sure you both saw finding that under the Supreme, not an AI decision, but sort of showing how the Court of Appeal is interpreting the case you mentioned involving the family violence project and indigent litigants, where the court of appeal said, Hey, look, bond requirements pending appeal

Jeffrey Lewis Yeah.

Ben Feuer need to be reduced to what litigants can afford. Now I personally would be surprised if that decision doesn't get Supreme Court review or at least a publication. I'm not quite sure I was persuaded by the reasoning, but it is a fascinating decision and showing how the access to technology and the way that changes how things work with indigent litigants can affect tremendously the practice of law and how things are shifting and changing. And but you mentioned also just sort of AI with indigeno litigants. I think one of the things that I have noticed in my practice and my friends who are trial lawyers have and in-house lawyers have definitely noticed in their practice is now when I get emails from sort of either unrepresented parties or parties who are re individuals who are sort of reaching out directly, not corporate parties or lawyers. I would say almost every single email that I get has been clearly written by AI, right? and it's they it's like it's obvious. and it makes it a little bit harder to kind of parse the email and kind of get a sense of what the client is going to be like potentially. and it doesn't always really explain the situations clearly. Sometimes it's actually a little bit of an annoying as it tries to tell you sort of what. they think that the AI thinks the AI the appellate issues are and that may lead the individual to think that the appellate issues are something that they are not. but my friends who are in-house or regular trial lawyers are spending a much more of their time dealing with pro se litigants who can now go to it to an AI and s look sometimes of course pro se litigants have meritorious litigation that they bring. that's Always been the case, but a lot are not either legally meritorious or even factually meritorious. yet, you can create a 120-page complaint in about 10 seconds with an AI and a couple of facts. You can put together a motion that somebody is lengthy and appears at kind of first glance to be cogent that somebody has to go through and sort of understand and sort of tie into the facts and see if that actually has merit or not. And look, that's that that's good from the sense of everyone getting their day in court, but there are some folks who want to have like every day of the week is their day in court and they're filing, all kinds of sort of frivolous things that a lawyer would never would never take and do. Yet somebody on the other side has to deal with it, a judge has to deal with it, a court has to deal with it. one of the things I was talking with Susan Gelmus, who you mentioned, is sort of how that's impacting the Ninth Circuit and their pro, their pro se docket, which has grown

Tim Kowal Mm.

Ben Feuer dramatically as pro sees who otherwise may not, be able to sort of even figure out the rules of filing, let alone write something to file, are taking huge advantage of AI in order to do that. Again, they're the Some of them may absolutely be meritorious and it's a good thing that they can bring this litigation or this case or this motion that maybe they couldn't afford a lawyer or get a lawyer to do, but a lot of them are not. and it's, a huge cost for the system and for clients who corporate clients who need to defend these pro se against these pro se litigations and pay their lawyers in order to do that. and that's costly.

Tim Kowal Well, that brings us to the last topic that I wanted to cover. we were talking about AI and writing, but now let's just talk about human writing. And

Ben Feuer Yeah.

Tim Kowal a house writing style is, one thing that that a pyramid model of a firm does tend to effectively transmit. But what happens in CALG where there is no pyramid? So what is Ben Feuer's approach to legal writing? And does Ben Feuer propagate that across all these attorneys with You know, much more experienced. You you're probably the youngest person at your firm. So do you get to dictate how everyone writes?

Ben Feuer No younger Yeah, I'm no longer the youngest person in the firm. I think

Tim Kowal Yeah. Okay.

Ben Feuer we have one lawyer who is younger than me. We're bringing in someone else in November who is also younger than me. but for a long time I was the youngest lawyer in the firm. It's sort of it's a it's a good thing that writing is probably in some ways, I mean, it's turned out managing is something that It's one of the reasons I think the firm has been so successful. But writing was really my skill before then. Again, that's why sort of Bill Hancock and John Eisenberg brought me in their practice in the very early days.

Tim Kowal Yeah, that's yeah, yeah. So you have a real talent for writing. So naturally you'd create a firm where you can't tell anyone what to do about writing.

Ben Feuer Right, yeah, right. Precisely, right? Where I where I write very little and can't tell anyone how to write. so we started off talking about sort of how we built CALG differently in part because the lawyer with whom I founded the firm, Bill Hancock, who by the way I should add, passed away a few years ago. So that's why he's sort of no longer part of it. I took over managing it as he got a little sick and it worked out, but the the One of the things, so so some of our competitors, where he previously worked, their approach is there is one way to do it. It is it is our way to do it. And in for some of our competitors, if you generate a case, you may have actually nothing to do with that case. It goes to a committee, you generate it, that's nice. The committee is going to decide who works on it, how it gets litigated, etc. our approach is sort of the opposite of that. Our view is, especially today, when clients hire lawyers more than they hire law firms. That if a client hires an individual lawyer, they come to me, they come to one of my partners, and they hire them to be their appellate lawyer, it's because they want that lawyer's judgment, experience, and approach in for to for their case. That's what they're looking for. They're hiring that lawyer. So there are certain sort of I don't want to say regulations, but there are certain rules that we sort of apply to every brief. If the citations are need to be correct. the citation style needs to be correct for whatever court we're in. other rules that sort of are inarguable need to be correct. but in other ways in terms of how they Want to frame the arguments, which arguments that lawyer thinks are the most effective, how they want to litigate it. We are going to largely defer to the lawyer who generated and is overseeing that appeal. On the view that that's who the client wanted to trust. Now there are certain things I or one of my other key partners will at least look at every brief that goes out the door briefly. and our paralegals are trained to flag certain issues. If one of our lawyers wanted to write in a brief that, boy, Koromatsu is a really great decision and we should follow it, that's something we'd probably step in and say, hey, we're gonna change that. That's not okay. but another example is that like I'm an Oxford comma guy. I think Oxford commas make things clearer. I think we should use Oxford commas in every kind in every situation. But I have some lawyers who don't. Who they think the actual commas bad and that's just how they want to litigate it. And that's the kind of thing where I'm gonna say, look, if you wanna do your brief with an ambiguous non-Oxford comma

Tim Kowal No

Ben Feuer that no one can understand what it is that exactly you're saying, hey, I'm not gonna step in your way, it's still potentially correct. Another one that's come up is double spacing after periods. I would learn to double space after periods. I tend to think that it's helpful. Because citations use single spacing. And so the double spacing separates the citation from the sentence. And also look, it's, I always say, pity the poor reader. There's a lot of words on the page. Judges and law clerks are reading. I was a law clerk, you're reading all day long. Give the reader a little more space, a little more white on the page. There's nothing wrong with that. But some of our words, go ahead.

Tim Kowal What about left justify versus full justify?

Jeffrey Lewis Yeah.

Tim Kowal Now you're just now you're just wreaking all havoc with space on the page.

Ben Feuer Yeah, now we're just sort of right. We can go down, right? We can go down. if I think we do almost everything left justified. If someone really strong, but in some courts you don't. I think in the US Supreme Court, I mean, so the first rule is that you always want to appear, I think, that you are a regular practitioner in whatever court you're appearing in. Right. Some courts, for example, in the Ninth Circuit, they almost always, have an dash with no spaces. On the sides. It's almost always how the judges of the Ninth Circuit, right? And the California Court of Appeal tends to vary a little bit more. Historically, they would do an EN dash with two spaces on either side. You always want to appear in the court as a regular practitioner in the court in which you are appearing, largely because one or one main reason I always say is because as the reader is reading through your brief, if there's something that's not what they're used to seeing, it's going to distract. And they're gonna stop reading the brief and they're gonna stop sort of processing what you're actually saying to focus on the fact that you did the EM-weird, right? Or something. And you don't want that, right? That's gonna hurt your advocacy and hurt your ability to persuade the reader.

Tim Kowal This person's an outsider. He doesn't know how the way things work here.

Ben Feuer They're an outsider, they don't know what the how things work here. And what was I reading? What were they saying? Right? And so they lose, the reader loses focus and is in. being persuaded about what you're writing. And ultimately our job, our fundamental job number one, is to win for our clients. And you win by persuading the reader as best you

Tim Kowal Yeah. Did I hear you call it E M dash and E N dash? Not and N dash?

Ben Feuer Sure. I always call them E dash and E N dashes. There's and N dashes, but I but that's ambiguous, right? Because what are you talking about? You're an and N and then you get an and N. So I always use both letters to try to make clear what I'm saying. but

Tim Kowal But didn't it originate from an dash was about the length of a capital letter and an N-dash was about the length of a capital letter N. And that

Ben Feuer I think that's right. Was it capital or was it lower game? Maybe it capital letters. Right. Right.

Tim Kowal I thought it was capital. Yeah.

Ben Feuer Right. But that's how we, that's how we always, that's how we always sort of break it down. What I call an dash or an dash. again, for to avoid ambiguity, because that's another thing. That's why I'm a big Oxford comic guy. You don't want ambiguity because you don't want the reader or the listener, somebody to not know what you're talking about and to get confused by what you're saying, because that's going to reduce the impact of.

Tim Kowal Yeah, that's why I always hate where I think a lot of people hate acronyms because when I see you see it in a brief, it's an it's a useful expedient for brief writing, but I always ask, how do you pronounce that? When you get up at oral argument, what are you gonna say? And you shouldn't

Ben Feuer Right.

Tim Kowal you just write down what you're going to say instead of using these shorthands?

Ben Feuer Right, No, right. I mean that and that's a that's a so other and other examples like that, sort of in terms of how the to go to your question of sort of do we have rules within the firm about how we how the briefs need to look and is there a house style? and the answer is within certain limitations, no, we're gonna let our lawyers do what they think is best.

Tim Kowal Century school book or a different font?

Ben Feuer We do have a standard font. We do use Century School

Tim Kowal There are some rules there. There you go.

Ben Feuer Book. I'll take you through that because we spend time thinking about it. Of all of the fonts, the Sarah fonts that you can use, I always like Garamond. I always thought Garamond was the classiest looking font. but Garaman Garamond has two problems. one, it's thin. So some people with poor eyes can't see it as easily. But the other problem with Garmin is it's it doesn't come with every installation of Microsoft Word. And we send drafts back and forth with clients. And what we were have what was happening is we would need to like embed the font in the Word file as we were sending it out. And the that was just causing problems. Sometimes it would go with, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes they had a different version of Garmin. So we realized we had to use one of the fonts that was a basic default font with every version of Word. And that's how we went to century school.

Tim Kowal So if there is there's no house style per se at CALG, what do you want a justice or any reader of a CALG brief to think or expect when one lands on their on their desk?

Ben Feuer Yeah, well, I mean, first thing I want them to see that our name is on it and to have a reassurance that everything is accurate, right? That everything they're reading is going to be reflected accurately by the record, reflected accurately by the case law, that they can believe what we're saying. and then I want them to be able to read the statement of facts and again, be Convinced and comfortable that it is, I want them to be so comfortable with the statement of facts. Again, facts, that the law clerk feel is comfortable copying and pasting the statement of facts that we wrote into the bench memo that they're circulating to the judges or justices. Now they're probably not gonna do that. That's really not how it works, but I want it to be so accurate that they would feel comfortable doing that. And part of that is to have it. not appear that it's such ad that it's advocacy and shaded in a way that's aside from being accurate that you read it and it seems like, at least reads like, it is an objective memo rather than sort of a piece of advocacy briefing. Even though of course it will be a type of advocacy that we'll do that we'll use. Because

Tim Kowal Advocacy by selection.

Ben Feuer I guess advocacy by selection, advocacy by sort of Framing the way the order of events is presented, clarity, oftentimes. I mean the record, I mean, gosh, I mean, even judges' rulings are often tremendously unclear. If I can make the facts clear and have the reader understand the facts, well, I'm three-quarters of the way to getting to my, getting to my win. because of course appeals are ultimately in many cases decided on. Facts. I have a limited amount that I can control kind of what the law that has developed previously is and says. But the facts of the case are going to be unique to that case. And so if we can present those just with tremendous clarity and tremendous reliability, then hopefully we can just it it will almost Brief will almost write itself that you can then say, and look, and given these facts, here's what the law is, here's the standard of review, here's how you need the prism through which you should be viewing these facts and the law that you should apply to these facts, and it should come out either with a reversal or an affirmance or whatever it is we're hoping the judge will or justice will do. so if we can come up with if we can have that credibility going in, have everything. Absolutely accurately reflect the facts of the case in the record, not leaving out sort of anything that shouldn't be left out, but still having, telling the story that we want to tell. Every appeal, of course, is a story. Telling the story that we want to tell, but in a way that seems like we're just reciting the facts that occurred. and then applying the law, again, completely accurately, with no hallucinations whatsoever, but also. not even just hallucinations, but correctly understanding the complex doctrines that may be in play. my hope is that will lead the reader to sort of naturally and easily come to the conclusion we hope they come to. So that's it.

Tim Kowal Last question, Ben. let's pull back out thirty thousand feet. CALG has done so much in such a relatively short amount of time. what's your what are your aspirations for let's say three years out? So that by the next time we have you back, hopefully within three years, we can ask you how's it going? And how are you doing on your prediction that you gave us in in September two thousand twenty six?

Ben Feuer Yeah, well, I mean, I'd love to come back. I think this is a really great podcast. I do many podcasts, and they tend to be sort of what's going on in the Supreme Court and sort of the sort of what's happening in with these specific things. And this is one of the only podcasts I know of that's really focused on the practice and the business of what we do. but so our firm has because our model is so flexible, we are always looking for. Terrific lawyers that kind of fit into any of the buckets that we, sort of look for to grow the firm. So we are always looking, of course, for sort of talented business generating lawyers who are either with firms that are big firms, which don't really appreciate, I think, appellate lawyers and what they do. I mean, the appellate lawyers in big law firms, I, the litigators in big law firms, you have to hit. t whatever, twenty four hundred hours a year say. But you that some of that's you're gonna be in depositions and some of that you're gonna be flying around the country and some of that you're gonna be, dealing with discovery disputes and some of that you're gonna be in trial, right? You're not all doing the same thing. Appellate lawyers, you're just sitting and writing for the most part. And that is really intensive brain work. I mean that is exhausting, back breaking kind of work. there was a a really tremendous Criminal appellate lawyer by the name of Dennis Reardon, who I was friends with many years ago. He died a couple years ago. Really a terrific lawyer. And he would refer to it as the rock-breaking work that you are kind of sitting there as lawyers, you go through a record as an appellate lawyer with kind of a pickaxe on the rock. And it's just, it is, it is hard work. and to get to those kinds of hours is I mean, it's just exhausting. And I and our lawyers who have come over from big law firms have said to me, I don't know how I did that. First, I think you normalize lawyers normalize a lot of what they do and you just get used to it. Human beings do. but when you step away from it for a little bit and you kind of look back and say, my God, how did I do that? That was really hard and exhausting.

Tim Kowal So Calg's at twenty eight lawyers, but you're not nearly done. It's still it's still expanding.

Ben Feuer Exactly. So we're all we're looking for sort of lawyers who generate business. We're looking for terrific lawyers who kind of do work. We've also been sort of looking at other jurisdictions and expanding outside of California. We opened an office last year in Washington, DC, because we have a somewhat active Supreme Court practice. we are looking at some of the other major markets in the US. Now part of it is just sort of do we meet the right people? who are understand what we're doing and understand our practice. We don't use recruiters. we don't our system, our model doesn't really make sense for recruiters. but we but we are always sort of on the lookout for people in other major metropolitan markets who potentially would be in a position to kind of open an office for us in some of these other cities. So that's one of the things we're looking at. But our practice in California is just so busy. firm has been in such demand and the demand continues to grow. We have just recently been brought in on some really major litigation, worth billions of dollars. So there there's a lot of demand for us in California and we're just sort of, staying the course in that regard and continuing to grow where we're successful as well.

Tim Kowal Well, Ben Feuer, we wish you much continued success. I hope to work with you, not opposite you. I hope to work with you andor your attorneys in the near future. yeah, yeah. Well,

Ben Feuer That'd be great. Yeah. Be tripping.

Tim Kowal thanks again so much for coming on. Ben, that's gonna I mean Jeff, that's gonna wrap us up this episode. If you have suggestion suggestions for future episodes, guests, or issues or cases to talk about, please email us at info@calpodcast.com. In our upcoming episodes, look for tips on how to lay the groundwork for an appeal when preparing for trial.

Ben Feuer Bye.