The Reasonably Prudent Law Student

0Ls, get used to writing second as 2d and third as 3d, etc. After you write your first legal paper (most likely a memo) you’ll just feel weird putting an R in any of those abbreviations. :-P

Again, this happened a while ago. Shortly before finals, actually, and I’m sure we all remember how crazed I was around that time. I was Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction, minus the fatal attraction part. I might have boiled bunnies while taking a break from proofing my appellate brief; we’ll never know because I have long since repressed that dark period of time known as ‘shortly before 1L finals.’

These oral arguments were for our appellate brief, where we were arguing the same issue as the motion to dismiss (first oral argument) but for the plaintiff, who’d been ruled against.

Image Credit: The Hoomster (aka…me!)

Ha ha, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as my little cartoon would suggest, no worries.

Our professor had originally wanted us to do our appellate arguments in the Federal Courthouse across the street with three of the appellate judges there. He warned us that they’d be tough, and, specifically, that there would be three (3) of them.

…Eep.

But in the end, we couldn’t get it to work out so he ended up holding oral arguments in the classroom. He was our sole judge, and to offset that, he asked difficult questions on review.

This argument was a little more nerve-wracking for me. I’m not entirely sure why. Personally, I found the appellate brief easier to write than the original motion to dismiss. It was much more formalistic: there were different sections (aside from the Argument section itself, like Issues Presented for Review, Jurisdictional Statement, Statement of the Case, etc) and there was a set way to tackle each section, and a lot of it just felt very structured and comfortable.

Maybe I was just nervous because I felt I knew the case better from the defendants’ side. After all, we’d spent forever on that original motion defending the three corporate officers from liability under the IL Wage Payment and Collection Act, and we hadn’t spent as long on the appellate brief arguing for the plaintiff that the officers qualified as employers under the IL Wage Act. Here, I was arguing the exact opposite thing that I’d originally written about, and perhaps it was that initial bias.

But it really wasn’t that bad. I argued for general jurisdiction based on continuous and systematic contacts, talked about fair play, and insisted that the langauge in the original complaint was not the use of mere conclusory allegations. It was going great until my professor threw out a question about why the fiduciary shield doctrine didn’t apply. We weren’t supposed to argue that or bring that up in the brief at all because it wasn’t addressed in the ruling on the district level, and it wasn’t one of the issues presented for review.

That threw me a little, but the fiduciary shield discussion still fit in with the IL Wage Payment and Collection Act, so I was able to pull something out without much difficulty.

For some reason, I was standing on my toes the whole time. There I am, wearing three inch heels (conservative black pumps, no worries, @DebraSnider), and still standing on my toes. Maybe a nervous tic? I have no idea.

Anyway, it wasn’t bad at all. Oral arguments really do seem so scary but once you get in there and you launch into your schpiel and start fielding questions, it’s fun. Exhilarating, really. And it’s over before you know it.

And the best thing about it: you already know it all. You’re not being grilled on something you might not have ever seen before. You spent however long (in our case, a week or two? Maybe a week and a half) writing the brief or motion and you’re familiar with the oft-cited cases and the state/federal law and most importantly, the issue at hand. Chances are (if you’ve prepared like you should have during the course of writing the brief/motion), there’s nothing that the judges can throw out that will be out of left field.

(And even if they do, you just have to answer the question directly and say you’re not sure but you’d like to be able to research the issue more fully. You just get into trouble when you evade and dance around it and try to divert attention to the strong points of your argument. There are some great recordings up on the 7th circuit site where judges FREAK OUT at attorneys who try to evade. Don’t be one of them. Because then future law students will listen to your argument and laugh at you.)

Yay! Two oral arguments under the belt. And they were both pretty fun.