Audio clips at trial & oral argument tips

Tim Kowal March 12, 2025

Even if you technically can’t use an electronic recording to create the appellate record, trial courts do provide them for us in your closing argument PowerPoint. Jeff shares his experience.

And after spending most of a morning watching oral arguments waiting for his case, Jeff offers these tips:

It took 20 minutes of argument time just for the panel to get its head around who was who in a case full of alphabet-soup entities. If you’re spending a third of oral argument time in front of a confused panel, you’re doing it wrong.
Try this:
If your case has lots of “ABC LLCs” and “ABC Holdings LLCs,” try using functional names instead—like “the management company,” and “the holding company,” "investor", "bank", "assignee," etc.
Anticipate this confusion in your briefs. Include a clear chart in the brief that helps track the parties, preferably directly in the brief or as a supplemental exhibit.

The goal is to reduce "friction." If you’ve used up all panel’s brain synapses just to understand the players, you’re going to have a poor time once you get to the merits.

We also get to a couple cases, including a trap on appellate briefing extensions.

Appellate Specialist Jeff Lewis' biography, LinkedIn profile, and Twitter feed.

Appellate Specialist Tim Kowal's biography, LinkedIn profile, Twitter feed, and YouTube page.

Other items discussed in the episode:

Are employees immune from paying discovery fees?

A stipulated dismissal is appealable, but not a voluntary dismissal?

Tim Kowal is an appellate specialist certified by the California State Bar Board of Legal Specialization. Tim helps trial attorneys and clients win their cases and avoid error on appeal. He co-hosts the Cal. Appellate Law Podcast at CALpodcast.com, and publishes summaries of cases and appellate tips for trial attorneys. Contact Tim at [email protected] or (949) 676-9989.

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Audio clips at trial & oral argument tips

Other items discussed in the episode:

Related Posts:

"Upon putting laws into writing, they became even harder to change than before, and a hundred legal fictions rose to reconcile them with reality." — Will Durant

Show neither partiality to the weak nor deference to the mighty, but judge your fellow men justly. — Leviticus

"God made the angels to show Him splendor, … Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind." — Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons

"A judge is a law student who grades his own papers." — H.L. Mencken

"It may be that the court is thought to be excessively legalistic. I should be sorry to think that it is anything else." — Hon. Sir Owen Dixon, Chief Justice of Australia

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." — Plato (427-347 B.C.)

"Moot points have to be settled somehow, once they get thrust upon us. If an assertion cannot be proved, then it must be settled some other way, and nearly all of these ways are unfair to somebody." —T.H. White, The Once and Future King

"At common law, barratry was 'the offense of frequently exciting and stirring up suits and quarrels' (4 Blackstone, Commentaries 134) and was punished as a misdemeanor." — Rubin v. Green (1993) 4 Cal.4th 1187