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12 Summer 2015 The Mississippi Lawyer An Interview with Chief Justice William L. Waller Jr. designated as a part of the record that should have been. If a different attorney handles the appeal you cannot control what happened at the trial level. And I am human like everybody else. I have made the wrong objection. I understand how mistakes happen. But I think for a good appeal you have to have a good trial. But here is what you can control. We see with more frequency than we should that lawyers fail to check the record. And it is very frustrating when attorneys seek leave to supplement the record with something they should have seen to start with. Sometimes they do not figure it out until they are way into briefing so they may not get to supplement the record. If you are going to file an appeal you have got to check the record when you designate it. The time to fix an omission in the record is really in the trial court. You may have to ask the court reporter to transcribe a motion hearing or suppression hearing or whatever. At the start make sure you have gotten everything that you need in your record. We have more problems with that than I would like. Then when writing the brief an attor- ney needs to put his or her best foot for- ward. Whatever the litigants position is it needs to be clearly articulated. Appellate judges have a lot to read. If you know what your message is that is what you need to lead with. It needs to be strong and it needs to be out front. Now what you think is the most important issue may not be what the appellate judges think is the most impor- tant issue so to some extent you have to include additional issues that you think the appellate judges may think is impor- tant. If you preserved the error and there is some law on it I would err on the side of including issues that you think may matter because if you do not the appellate courts cannot take them up. We see what the best law is. I think that practitioners should not be caught with us finding a code section or case that they have not found. Todays practitioners are busy with phone calls emails clients trials motions and running offices. It takes a different hat to prepare and file an appeal and it does not necessarily fit into that kind of schedule. I recommend to any practitioner that does not have time to handle an appeal consider associating someone who does appellate work on a daily basis. If it is question of research a practitioner may want to consider hiring a law student to help. In the briefs it is just so important to be concise not unnecessarily verbose. You want to have as little in there as you need to accomplish whatever points you want to make and explain the best law. You can miss a case and no one is going to jump up and down. But if you get a fact wrong that kind of mistake affects the readers perception of the whole case so it is really important to make sure that the facts are absolutely supported by the record. VLL When a case is before the Mississippi Supreme Court how important is a lawyers credibility WLW Well I do not think it is necessar- ily important unless you are really dealing with someone who has been sanctioned or something like that. I would say that if the facts are there and the law is there that is all you can do. We may have a more crit- ical eye if we find that the facts have been misstated or if we think liberty has been taken in expounding on a case that may not say what the lawyer claims it says. Once that line is crossed there would certainly be some skepticism on our part or the standard of review may be a little higher. VLL What is the most serious chal- lenge to our justice system today WLW Time is very important. Ensuring a fair independent and efficient judiciary is important. I will give you some exam- ples. If the public does not believe that justice can be obtained in the court system then they are going to do something else. For example if people were satisfied with the court system we would not have mediation and arbitration. I am not sure that we have really moved away from typewriters and carbon paper. I am not sure that we have figured out a way to take advantage of the tech- nology that we have today. You can merge two Fortune 500 companies quicker than we can get an opinion out sometimes. I am frustrated about that. And I am sensi- tive to the costs. It is so expensive for an appeal. We have to constantly be think- ing about what we can do to make the sys- tem more responsive to the public that needs it. Otherwise the courts will become criminal courts because those litigants cannot go anywhere else. Take the flip side of that our country was founded on the rule of law and not the rule of man. By that I mean you have to have constan- cy in the law predictability in the law. Otherwise commerce cannot flourish and people do not have any assurances about their property rights. We have to be very careful about med- dling with the law. Once lawyers cannot predict what the law is then the public cannot be sure about what the law is so it can really lead to a fundamental break- down. We need to be very careful about changes in the common law and the way we interpret things. Law has to be rele- vant but you also have to keep in mind that it has to be fair efficient and inde- pendent. LACOSTELACOSTE ARCHITECTARCHITECT JAY LACOSTE CONSTRUCTION PREMISES LIABILITY 2349 TWIN LAKES CIRCLE 601 981-2853 JACKSON MS 39211 VIVIZODAOL.COM