Last month I had the pleasure of presenting to the Orange County Bar Association on a topic I return to often: how good cases die on appeal, not because the appellant was wrong on the merits, but because avoidable procedural mistakes made reversal impossible before the briefing even began.
The talk was titled the "Appeals Survival Guide," and the central premise is straightforward: most civil appeals, 70 to 80 percent, are affirmed, even when the trial court was wrong. Appellate courts are highly deferential, and the record built at trial is often the deciding factor long before the appellate court reads a single brief. If you lose at trial, lose on the merits. Don't lose because of a mistake your own attorney made.
The presentation covered ten practical tips for trial counsel, from building the record correctly and requesting a statement of decision, to filing timely post-trial motions and managing the notice of appeal deadline, as well as bonus tips for respondents looking to protect a hard-won judgment on appeal.
I also covered the numbers that every trial lawyer should share with clients before filing: beyond the 70–80 percent affirmance rate, civil writs are summarily denied 90 to 95 percent of the time, and civil petitions for review to the California Supreme Court are denied 97 percent of the time. Managing expectations early is part of the job.
The presentation closed with a discussion of AI ethics and best practices, a topic that is no longer theoretical. Courts have already sanctioned attorneys for submitting briefs with hallucinated citations and unverified AI output, and California appellate courts have made clear that the duty to verify legal authorities is not delegable to any non-attorney. We also explored where AI tools can be used responsibly and productively in appellate practice.
You can download a PDF of the full presentation below.
