How Do We Handle Long-Term Client Communications During the Appeal Process?

You know, the appellate process can really take a long time. We’ve been involved in cases where a combination of interlocutory appeals and mandamuses and even appeals of final judgments and reversals caused that case to last over 10 years. And so obviously, we get a little frustrated waiting for the appellate process to come to completion, but our clients who generally have never experienced this process, they have a lot of anxiety. They have a lot of frustration with the waiting. So in multiple ways we try to keep them educated, informed, and comforted during the appellate process. The appellate process begins with, typically the two parties, the appellant and the appellee, filing their arguments, their written arguments, the briefs. So the appellant will file their brief, then the appellee will file their brief. And then the appellant will get to file the 3rd brief and have the final say in what’s called the reply brief. That takes some time. That is easy to estimate how long it’s gonna take and so the first thing we do is inform our clients of this briefing process. And how long it’s gonna take the rules set forth these timelines we have enough experience to know generally how long that process might be delayed through continuances and you know where the court will grant a party extra time to file their brief. And then after that, when the briefs are filed, we are typically assigned a panel of three appellate court judges, not in every appeal is the entire appellate court going to consider your appeal. So the first round of appeals in Texas is to the intermediate Court of Appeals in your area, and so typically an appeal will be heard only by 3 of those judges. Once we know who the 3 judges are assigned to our panel, we then study the turnaround time for that particular panel. And we try to ascertain how many months is it taking for that panel to turn around appeals? It’s not an exact science, but we get some idea of whether we’re talking a year or 2 or 3 years for that panel to typically turn around appeals. It’s normally in the year to 18 months time frame and so then we inform the clients, you know, how long to expect to wait. Of course we don’t wait a year or 18 months to touch base with the client again we touch base periodically. And candidly, you know, the, the, the news is really no news, you know, we, we talked to the client, we still haven’t heard anything from the court, but we let them know this is not a good sign or a bad sign, it’s just the nature of these appeals. They just take time. And of course the minute we get a ruling from the appellate court we call the client, we let them know how it turned out.