The Michigan Court of Appeals recently offered a case study in judicial triage: with a short “focus order” issued less than two weeks before argument, the panel redirected People v Plomb from two garden-variety issues to a third—judicial interference—that would dominate both the oral argument and the published opinion. What a “focus order” is—and what…
Tag: Lori Shemka
AI-generated alt-text can be an image-captioning start. The legal writer will do more.
This colorful image was included in the State Appellate Defender Office’s brief recently filed with the Michigan Supreme Court in People v Soriano (Docket No. 167373). Disclaimer: I don’t know whether SADO used any AI tools as a resource when deciding how to caption this image in its brief. Even so, the image and SADO’s…
Citing trouble: The unpredictable cost of AI-made-up case names and summaries in court filings to self-represented persons or attorneys
How’d you react if you ordered a delightful gift from a “discount” website to be delivered to a good friend for their birthday…but they instead received a gift box filled with dirty, smelly rags (and your name on the gift note)? When a self-represented litigant or attorney asks AI (artificial intelligence) tools like ChatGPT, Claude,…
Google NotebookLM for pre-filing review in Michigan
NotebookLM can be an efficient and collaborative tool as the legal filer checks for proper document and citation formatting—a painstaking task often overlooked. Missing elements can result in a rejected filing or poorly reflect on the writer’s professional competency. For trial court filings, one can create a “Notebook” and upload MCR 1.109, the Michigan Appellate…
Images in legal writing? Include descriptive captions. AI can help.
A “captions” search of this website recalls earlier posts on why image captions play an important—but often overlooked—role in persuasive and informative legal writing. Three times, the State Appellate Defender Office included excellent descriptive image captions in its Application for Leave to Appeal in People v David Serges (167154). The Michigan Supreme Court recently ordered…
Judicial statements: a window to possible future arguments
Most attention of an appellate court’s heavy lifting is given to its written opinions and orders: requested relief is either granted or denied. But now and again a jurist includes a written statement signaling forward-looking interest in future arguments. Astute trial and appellate lawyers (and judges) make it a routine to review an appellate court’s…
Uniform emoji descriptions for legal writing
3,790 emojis are in the Unicode Standard as of September 2024. The next expected emoji release (Emoji 17.0) is slated for September 2025. Unicode and Emojipedia are the go-to resources for finding uniform text descriptions to pair with the emojis mentioned in legal writing. Unicode keeps a separate list of modifier sequences that takes into…
A new way to use audio files as an information resource using NotebookLM
Many probably know of NotebookLM as the AI collaborator where you can upload documents (“sources”) to a digital “notebook” and then ask questions about the information in your sources. NotebookLM responds with an answer and citations to the sources you’ve supplied. Since you control what NotebookLM focuses on, there’s less worry about made-up hallucinations. NotebookLM…
Michigan Civil Jury Instructions encourage respect of any expressed personal pronouns
Progress. As the Michigan Supreme Court considered its administrative file (in 2023) to amend a court rule that would allow parties and attorneys to include any preferred personal pronoun in the caption section of court filings and would require courts to use those pronouns (unless doing so would result in an unclear record), I submitted…
(Emojis omitted.)
Legal-decision readers are familiar with quotation parentheticals like (emphasis added/omitted/changed), (alteration in original), (quotation marks and citation omitted), or (cleaned up). A new kid shows up every once in a great while: (emojis omitted). I noticed (emojis omitted) in the August 29, 2024 memorandum decision from the Indiana Court of Appeals Shannon v Indiana, 23A-CR-2744…