The Michigan Supreme Court decided Marion v Grand Trunk Western Railroad Company (Docket No. 164298) on June 5, 2024. The .pdf that was first released was created at 2:29 p.m. Just like with lawyers and paralegals, sometimes an oversight is recognized after the file is submitted. And that happened here. An updated .pdf file was…
Tag: PDF
Putting Claude.ai to work creating outlines of filed court briefs
Given Anthropic’s Claude.ai’s impressive ability to handle .pdf uploads and complex prompts, it seemed only right to upload public efiled court briefing, put the AI-created output in comparative table form, and see how things would go. Overall? Pretty darn good! Check out how well (with a couple of misses) Claude followed my instructions on how to…
Six user-friendly things about the Michigan Governor’s e-filed brief
Michigan’s Governor filed a supplemental brief to the Michigan Supreme Court while the Court considers her April 7, 2022 Executive Message. The nicely formatted brief makes for an easier read. Six things stand out. [1] Spacing. Nice spacing is used in the arguments section of the table of contents page, the authorities index, and between…
Understanding and using Word’s Styles and templates to format legal briefs (a guide)
If I had a dollar for each time I’ve read or heard a well-intentioned person say, “Lawyers (or law students) need to learn how to use Styles and templates when writing their legal briefs . . .” And, yet, for all of those who encourage, “You should,” I’ve never seen someone also point to a…
#DataPrivacy in Legal Writing
Excited to share this legal-writing Venn as folks and groups mark #DataPrivacy day. This post covers first principles, context, and tips on how we can continue to recognize and mitigate identity theft risks in that part of our legal writing that makes its way into public court filings. [Spoiler: Another Michigan privacy court rule kicks…
Creating an eReference library
I own many physical books but they’re usually not convenient for when I need to consult them. Sometimes, I may be too lazy to pull one or two off the shelf and start flipping through the pages (Black’s Law Dictionary weighs a ton; The Bluebook invites many rabbit holes when time is short). And on…
Show off those electronic bookmarks!
You want your readers to see your bookmarks if you are in the elite 21% who made the effort to create them. (And there is no excuse to not create bookmarks!)