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Going back to litigating in federal court soon, and it made me wonder whether you all developed any pet peeves as far as litigants' behavior during your time as a law clerk? For instance, if a defendant filed a dispositive motion and attached only a portion of a deposition that was framed in a misleading way? Or if parties made ex parte calls to chambers making demands?

If parties called chambers making ex parte demands they wouldn’t have to worry about my (the clerk’s) reaction, they’d get reamed by my judge.

I also kind of learned to assume that everything attached was framed in a misleading way.

I've been surprised by how many lawyers blow right through the page limits, especially on reply briefs.

Please read the local rules and check for any judge-specific rules. We won't really throw things out for not following our formatting guidelines, but it definitely annoys everyone.

Please do not call or email chambers to "ask a question" when you are actually trying to ex parte inform us of whatever thing opposing counsel did.

Nothing made me roll my eyes more than briefs that spent any time implying that the other side were idiots and/or assholes. Just make your arguments. Having litigated actual cases now, I get it, but the judge and clerks really don’t care.

Elston Gunn wrote:Nothing made me roll my eyes more than briefs that spent any time implying that the other side were idiots and/or assholes. Just make your arguments. Having litigated actual cases now, I get it, but the judge and clerks really don’t care.

+1, it annoys me to no end when parties do this, and makes me think less of them.

It usually made me laugh, but it did make me think they were whiners.

It always annoyed me when boomer lawyers would scan in their documents in stead of converting the native document to a PDF. Or, even worse, scanning in a PDF rather than just attaching the original PDF. It would make ctrl-fing a brief unreliable because the OCR tool for a scanned in brief is unreliable. I remember having to actually read an entire insurance policy to make sure I didn't miss anything because it was scanned in.