UPDATE: This seminar occurred in the past, and the seminar materials are now available.
• LESA Library subscribers can already access course materials through the LESA Library.
• You can purchase the seminar on demand to stream videos of speaker presentations and download course materials as PDFs.
• Alternatively you can purchase course materials a la carte (search court of appeal).
• You can also view the list of upcoming seminars to discover live programs that are available now.
What do a Victorian mystery novel, a recently retired Alberta Justice, and a LESA seminar have in common?
The short answer is that they were all part of a lovely and interesting conversation; the long answer, well, that’s what this blog is all about.
This past week LESA spoke with the Honourable J.E.L. Côté about our upcoming Court of Appeal Practice program, which, as he explains, is “really a basic course in advocacy – both written and oral – and how the two communicate. It [covers] a lot of detailed points that are peculiar to the Court of Appeal, but the real heart of it is much more basic and broad.”
This program provides both criminal and civil litigators with the opportunity to join members of the bench and fellow practitioners in a discussion of the most common Court of Appeal topics, including factums, civil litigation appeals, and preparing the appeal record. In addition to Côté, the seminar’s engaging speakers include the following experienced practitioners and judiciary:
Honourable Justice P.A. Rowbotham
Honourable Justice F.F. Slatter
Mona Duckett QC
Frank Foran QC
Melanie Hayes-Richards
Factums is one topic particularly near and dear to Côté, and he’ll be weighing in on them in the seminar.
The big thing I’m taking about are factums – written argument. … I believe that the great majority of lawyers are not reaching anything like their potential in the written arguments that they file, and I think with a little guidance they could make their written arguments two to three times as effective – just with their existing knowledge and abilities.”
For Côté, this program is valuable because attendees should gain practical advice and tips they can implement in their own practice, including samples that they will carry away from the program to use back in the office.
We’re working very hard to give people at least two model factums (written arguments) to use [that] we think don’t look like your typical Alberta factum but [that] we think are probably a more effective model. … I really want to stress simplicity and clarity in writing, and I think it is something that the legal profession has not really concentrated their minds on. I don’t say they’re incapable of it, but I don’t think they’ve seen the importance of it. When I was practicing law, I didn’t really properly understand that, but, when I became a judge, I had the great good fortune to take some … courses on judgment writing.”
Another benefit to the program is that, while it is aimed primarily at learning to increase your persuasiveness, comfort, and chances of success in the Court of Appeal, the skills you learn can apply to other contexts as well.
I think that a great deal of what’s in the program is readily transferable from the Court of Appeal to other court proceedings, particularly special chambers applications … and also to many types of appearances between various boards and tribunals. So I would say that the whole course … centers on a lot of very basic things. … I’m hoping that people will carry away from this something that they will be able to remember and use for the rest of their practicing life.”
We don’t want to keep you in suspense waiting for these tips until the program runs in October, and we imagine that you’re dying to know how this all connects to Victorian fiction – so here’s a little snippet from Côté about one of his own writing tips that is especially useful if you are caught without your computer.
His tip started with a question.
Have you heard about the poor man’s word processor? The way that journalists used to write things? … I read about it in an 1860s English novel, and then, when I used to do legal work for the Edmonton Journal, I saw it in some of the stuff they did; it was still being used when they were just transferring over from typewriters to computers. … [The novel] was The Women in White by Wilkie Collins. Toward the end they get the villain – Count Fosco – to write out a confession of what happened. … He’s a former journalist, so … he set himself down at a little table and he had a stack of writing paper and he had a number of pens or quills and bottle of ink. Then he cut the sheets of paper, which were letter-sized, in half. Then he started writing, and he made quite sure that he didn’t write very much on any sheet of paper. No sentence or paragraph ever ran over one sheet of paper to another. And as he wrote each page, he would just turn it over, face down. When he had finished his draft, he then read them over again and made a few corrections and then decided whether he like the arrangement. In some cases he didn’t like the arrangement, so he simply moved sheets of paper elsewhere in the stack. And when he finally had them the way he wanted, only then did he number the pages. … For a lawyer who is ever stuck somewhere having to write something – like you get caught in the airport and you don’t have your computer with you [but] you have some time and [ideas are] all teeming in your mind and you want to get [them] down now – well that’s the best way to do it. … What I’ve done when I draft something, and I usually draft in hand, is I have a bunch of sheets of paper with a vertical margin ruled about 40% of the way across the page. I only write on the right hand part, so there isn’t that much on a page. … Then not only can you rearrange the pages if you want, but if you want to make an insert, well, you’ve got that wide margin and you just write things there and draw an arrow where to insert them.”
So there you have it, that’s what a Victorian mystery novel, a recently retired Alberta Justice, and a LESA seminar have in common – writing tips.
To learn more about the program’s other tips and topics, check out the program brochure. You won’t want to miss all of the tips that will be shared at the Court of Appeal Practice seminar, so reserve your spot now to attend the program in Edmonton (October 8) or Calgary (October 14).
