Thoughts while responding to a crappy brief.

I am finishing a reply to a truly bad brief. I won't tell you a thing about the case, since for all I know the opponent or someone else in the same office reads this, but the person who wrote this brief should be embarrassed to have submitted it. In addition to a host of typos, grammatical errors, and formatting glitches, it contains a serious misstatement of the law and numerous significant factual mistakes.

Responding to this type of garbage is tougher than you might think. Particularly in habeas cases, where the government lawyers need not do a particularly good job to win most of their cases most of the time, I can't assume that the court will give more credence to my arguments just because they're better written or because I've given a more accurate account of the record. Plus, because I'm a self-righteous snot, I have to restrain myself from calling the opposing lawyer a total bleeding moron (even though I would do so with schmancier words). So I've backspaced my way out of the unnecessary namecalling and simply pointed out the mistakes, allowing the errors themselves to speak to the errer's intelligence. I've also tried to refocus the court on my (correct) facts and arguments without rewriting the whole damn opening brief.

A wee lesson to all of you young (and not-so) lawyers and lawyers-to-be out there: cite check, cite check, cite check. And read the record. Because whatever the outcome of the case, you want to win the lawyering contest every single time.