Reflections on 100 E ...

Reflections on 100 Episodes

July 21, 2022 | by D. Todd Smith

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This week, co-hosts Todd Smith and Jody Sanders celebrate the Texas Appellate Law Podcast’s 100th episode! When they started the podcast just before the pandemic hit in 2020, neither of them could have imagined how much they would learn, how much fun they would have, and all the great people they would meet. To celebrate, Todd and Jody count down their top ten tips from their guests—from finding your niche to riding out the arc of despair—and a few bonuses. Please join us to celebrate and hear some of the best the podcast has to offer, plus some takeaways and gratitude!

We are celebrating our 100th episode. Jody and I are here to talk to you about that and go over some things that we have learned over 100 episodes. Our attempt was to distill down our top ten tips that our guests have been so kind as to leave us with on the show. We may have a bonus tip or two as we get into this, but that’s what we’re going to do for this setup. Jody, let me kick it over to you. What is your big takeaway? We have been doing this for years. We talk all the time on the show about how it has been a positive experience for us. What’s your big takeaway from doing our show?

There are a couple. The first is, frankly, I’m shocked that people still tune in. It is amazing to me. I was excited about this when we first talked about it. I love doing it, but I’m still amazed that we have done 100 episodes. It doesn’t seem real. Maybe once or twice a month, if I’m at some event where other lawyers are, they will come up and say, “I love the show.” It always makes me feel great to know that people enjoy and look forward to it.

Number one is I appreciate that there’s an audience out there that loves to nerd out on this stuff as we do. Thank you for that. Keep reading and telling us that you like to read because that makes us happy. My bigger takeaway of substance is that there is no one right way to do this. We have talked to a lot of people in a lot of different roles in the appellate system and the legal system generally. It’s amazing to see the diversity of creativity, background, and practice that people bring and can be successful in their own way and so many different ways. I love that.

The other thing is that it has reinforced for me that everybody in the legal system, the appellate system, or whatever system you want to call it is a human being. The vast majority of them are trying to do the best that they can. We can agree on whether it’s good enough and whether we think their approaches or goals are right, but everyone is trying to do their best and make it the best system they can. It’s great to have that reinforcement by doing this for me.

It’s to see all the people because, particularly in the appellate system, you don’t have a lot of interaction with the decision-makers, the judges, and the process. Much of it is spent on our laptops and computers, reading and writing. You send a big stack of paper over to them, maybe you get 20 to 30 minutes for an oral argument once, and then you get a decision months down the road. I love getting to talk to people in all aspects of the decisions, the judges, the clerks, the staff attorneys, and the practitioners. That side of it is something that I have loved to see in doing this.

We did start this as the show, but one thing that I’ve been happy to see is how much traction we have gotten online through the appellate Twitter community and people sharing our episodes, commenting, and complimenting our episodes. When we approached folks from out of state, the fact that we’re in Texas and the fact that our show is called Texas Appellate Law has not been a barrier.

We have attracted some very high-quality guests from other states and people who don’t have anything to do with Texas appellate law specifically. What we found is that there are commonalities, certainly starting during the pandemic when everyone was so desperate to talk to other people on the one hand. On the other hand, they had a lot of time to give. It helped us out a lot.

One of my takeaways from this is I’ve been super pleased and impressed that so many high-quality people have been willing to give us their time, share their specific thoughts, and help us get to know them better. If you’re a reader of the show and you’ve paid attention along the way, you know that we don’t dive into meaty, substantive issues on many of our episodes right away.

We like to take the time to get to know our guests a little bit and humanize them somewhat because even now, especially among the judicial guests, it’s difficult to do that day in and day out. I’ve seen it as a real opportunity for us to get to know our guests better ourselves but also to help portray them as people and help them either become known or get to know our folks better.

One thing that surprised me is that when we first started, I thought, “We will sit around and talk about the latest Texas Supreme Court decision or some procedural issue that only folks like us could nerd out about.” It has gone in a completely different direction from that. We will do that. It’s fun when we have substantive episodes, but to me the value in this has been the connections that we have been able to make, the people we have been able to meet, and the information that we have been able to provide to our guests in a format that’s so easy to consume.

I don’t know what I expected when we started, but I’ve been super pleased with how it has gone. We have made the transition from the change in my law firm. I want to give a quick shout-out and say thanks to Butler Snow for the role that the firm has taken on in helping to manage this. It has helped me personally. Also, I want to go ahead and acknowledge our sponsors before we dive into our tips.

There’s Court Surety Bond Agency for appellate lawyers. If you practice civil appellate law, that’s an entity you ought to get to know because, eventually, you’re going to need a bond of some kind or advice on a bond. They’re freely giving their knowledge and information on that. There’s Thomson Reuters. Most appellate lawyers I know are pretty partial to Westlaw. I’ll admit to being one of those.

We were very conscious from the beginning when we decided to entertain the idea of having sponsors that we wanted them to be organizations that fit with what we were doing and the topic of the show. We have been successful at maintaining that. I’ll give a shout-out and thanks to those folks. I want to thank you, Jody, because without you on this show and on other shows that we have appeared on together before, I don’t think we would be here.

I could never have gotten it off the ground on my own. It wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun either.

two people talking
Appellate Law Reflections: The court is telling you specifically what it wants to know. So as an advocate, your job is to help the court. If the court is interested in an issue, you have to address it.

It has been great for you and me to become friends and get to know each other going through this process. It is always nice when you come across another professional who handles themselves in the way that you think things ought to be handled. It has been a real pleasure so far. I look forward to doing the next hundred. With that, then I will start us with the top ten and have a bonus or two. These are going to more or less be in chronological order. There’s no order of preference for sure.

The first tip that I wanted to cover is we had Judge Emily Miskel from Collin County come on the show back when we first started. She talked a lot about Zoom hearings. We gave her the opportunity to give a tip, and her tip was to make your decision-maker’s job easy. She gave the example of if you go into court and say, “Judge, whatever you think the right thing to do is here” isn’t the right approach to getting the court to make a decision. You’re asking the court to do all the heavy lifting.

She said something to that effect, as I recall. This applies not only to trial courts but also to appellate courts because if you go into some contested hearing in a trial court, always my practice is this. It’s very common to go in with a proposed order laying out exactly what I want the judge to do. The same concept applies in appellate courts. With motions, you want to be that specific but also in your briefs. You’ve got to think, “What relief am I asking the court to give me?” Be very specific in that.

Judge Miskel gave the good advice of instead of asking the court to do whatever it thinks is right, in which case her point was, “It’s a lot easier for me to deny that relief when I don’t know what you’re asking for. I can deny you relief.” Her tip was to offer a plan to the decision-maker and not make the decision-maker do all the work to come up with what the outcome ought to be in a case. That one stuck with me this whole time. I thought it would be worth highlighting in our conversation.

Our next tip is a combined tip both from Justice Ken Wise of the 14th Court of Appeals and Chris Attig, who is a veterans’ claims attorney in Arkansas. The distillation of both of their tips was to learn and practice your craft. Justice Wise, in particular, talked about writing and said, “You don’t have to be a great writer, but you need to strive to be the best writer you can be and practice to make yourself better. In particular, when you have appellate justices, you have to read these long and sometimes very dense and complicated briefs.”

The best writing you can do is the key to success there because if they can’t follow your argument or don’t want to, you’re missing a huge opportunity to persuade. Chris said the same thing, “Pick up the books.” He mentioned Judge Aldisert’s Winning on Appeal. He talked about Ross Guberman. There are so many great resources out there about how to make yourself a better writer. That doesn’t mean you have to be the best writer, but you can certainly continue to strive to be a better writer. That’s true. Continue to learn and practice.

The other thing Chris added at the end that I appreciate is making mistakes and learning from them. Blake Hawthorne won’t admit this, but there’s a ghost that lives in the eFiling system. Every time you push that filing button, they go in, mess up some of the citation formats, and put in punctuation where it’s not supposed to be. Those are pretty harmless mistakes, but sometimes you make bigger mistakes than that. That’s the way that we learn and get better. It is super important to accounting for, digesting, and marking off that you won’t do them again.

Tip number three comes from Texas Supreme Court Justice Brett Busby. I summarized it as, “Address the court’s questions at oral argument,” which is good advice. All appellate practitioners who have done this for any length of time would agree with that. Busby told a little bit of a story. He said that while he was on a panel in the Court of Appeals when he was still a Court of Appeals Justice, it was in the briefing, perhaps. One side described the other side’s argument as disingenuous and didn’t provide a substantive response to it.

Naturally, that left the panel with some questions. They had a pre-argument conference and decided to come out, ask a pointed question, and ask the advocate to address in addition to whatever else they wanted to talk about or the particular issue that they had not substantively addressed in their briefing. The advocate came to the lectern and said something to the effect of, “I’ll throw out my outline.”

The court had asked them to address this particular issue. The advisability of taking on that statement to the court seems fairly obvious, but his overall point or the real tip here was that the court is telling you specifically what it wants to know out of the gate. As an advocate at oral argument, your job is to help the court. If the court is going to go to the trouble to specifically tell you, “This is an issue we’re interested in,” the right approach to that is to put everything you have into addressing that issue.

Maybe it doesn’t fit precisely with the outline that you prepared for the oral argument, but if that’s what the court is interested in, frankly, you do need to be prepared to throw out your outline because you might spend the whole of your argument time addressing the issue and then responding to follow up questions. Part of the flexibility that advocates need to have at oral argument is to be able to pivot when you get a tough question like that. When the court sets the stage on what it’s interested in, take the time to thoroughly address the court’s question before moving back into the outline that you’ve prepared.

That’s a great one. Our next one comes from Kevin Dubose by way of Skip Watson, “Opposing counsel is not your enemy.” Kevin was telling a story about when he was interviewing Skip for the Appellate Section’s Oral History Project. I’m going to read what Skip said to him because it leads to the tip. He said, “Kevin, the opposing counsel is not your enemy. It’s another professional trying to do their job to represent their client the best they can. Just because we have an adversarial system, you don’t need to be adversarial towards each other.”

Kevin was struck by that and offered his reflections on it. Any of us who have done litigation or appeals for any length of time can name a bunch of people who were far more adversarial than they needed to be. Being a zealous advocate for your client doesn’t mean you have to necessarily denigrate or fight with the other side.

We’re very lucky, in particular in Texas on the appellate side, because we do have the standards for appellate conduct that try and eliminate a lot of that. It doesn’t work 100% of the time, but that is right. Lawyering is hard. Having an opposing counsel that makes it so much harder does add to the stress unnecessarily. When you can do the same job, you can advocate effectively for your client without being that way and disagree without being disagreeable.

group of people sitting at a table discussing something
Appellate Law Reflections: The opposing counsel is not your enemy. It’s an adversarial system, but you don’t need to be adversarial towards each other.

That was wise advice from Skip and for Skip to have taught Kevin Dubose that lesson. There’s a lot of wisdom collectively between those two. That was a great one to hear. The next tip was from Jason Steed. Jason’s tip was to always read the statute. Jason framed the tip with a problem that he had seen with advocates arguing about statutory language and statutory issues and citing only two cases.

We see a lot in our state because our legislature meets every other year and will amend statutes frequently. One problem with relying on case law is that the statute may have been amended without your knowledge. You may be relying on an old law. You can see how this would potentially affect your credibility with the court if you’re arguing about a statute and language that have been changed.

Jason’s tip was to always read the statute. He says, “Let’s start with the definitions,” which is always a great thing, “read the passages above it and below it and make sure that you are starting from the language that the legislature has declared to be the law.” Here in our case, it’s the law of Texas. The same would apply to federal statutes or any other state. Don’t make the mistake of relying on case law in which the statute could have been changed.

Here’s one good example of this that I thought of right away. We may have even discussed it in the episode. It’s our Texas Citizens Participation Act or the Anti-SLAPP statute here in Texas, which has been amended more frequently in the last couple of sessions and has had some very significant changes made on things that would be outcome-determinative on whether the statute applies or not. That was a great bit of advice from Jason. I was glad to have him give it.

Our next tip comes from Rachel Stinson, who was both a former state and federal law clerk and a career attorney in the federal system for a little while too. Her tip was to mind the microphone. It’s a great reminder for all of us as in-person proceedings have picked back up and are moving toward normal, especially in federal court, but it’s worth remembering in state court too.

There may always be a microphone on. Rachel talked about when she was working in the federal courthouse with Judge Hanks. Both on phone calls and when people were in the courtroom, there are microphones. You pick up and hear a lot of things that go on in the courtroom, even when there’s no staff out there or when there’s no judge on the bench.

They hear a lot of things from the counsel that talks freely out there. The counsel probably doesn’t realize that’s getting sent back to the chambers and the staff area. Remember, anytime you’re in a courthouse, whether state or federal, assume that there may be a mic transmitting somewhere back into the courtroom. Mind what you say and the things that you say about your case, the people involved, the judge, or any of that stuff in particular.

Our next tip comes from Mia Lorick. Justice Rebeca Huddle from the Texas Supreme Court echoed these sentiments. We will treat those together. Mia’s tip was to be nice and respectful to everyone that you encounter in law practice. Everyone is working hard trying, especially younger lawyers. You’re trying to build your reputation and career. You see stories online all the time about how it takes a lifetime to build a reputation and about five seconds to destroy it, especially in the age of Twitter and Facebook because there are no secrets anymore.

Mia suggests being kind to everyone that you come across in your law practice, such as colleagues at work, law students, your paralegal, your assistant, or very importantly, court staff or maybe a parking attendant at the courthouse. It was somebody that Mia mentioned. In the practice of law, there are over 100,000 lawyers in our state, but it’s very localized. Jody and I both have this experience. There are a lot of local lawyers that we know. People do get reputations, both good and bad.

If you follow the default of treating everybody with respect and civility, it takes the Lawyer’s Creed to the next level. That will take you very far in your career. I can give a personal anecdote about this. When I was a young lawyer and I started my career in Dallas, I made a point to get to know some of the civil transcript staff at the Dallas County Courthouse. They were the ones that were responsible for collecting the clerk’s records.

Somebody had given me this advice. It would have been in my nature anyway, but I took a little extra time to visit with them because you sometimes had to go to the courthouse to get the transcript back in the day. That small kindness was never lost on the person that I visited that day. To this day, I still hear from him on Facebook. He will sign in to wish me a happy birthday. I haven’t talked to him in probably two decades. It’s amazing.

It goes to show you never know when that act of being kind and treating someone with respect, even in a difficult situation, can come back and pay dividends later in your career. It’s the best approach to take. Justice Huddle echoed, “What matters most at the end of the day is how you treat people.” Her advice was to be kind. Even when you lose or something goes wrong, she suggested picking yourself up, trying to be kind to people, and trying to move on the best you can. That’s one of the things that help us all survive the stress of our occupation sometimes. That’s another good bit of advice there.

Our next one comes from Chief Justice Bridget McCormack of the Michigan Supreme Court. Her tip is to be the court’s thought partner. She’s talking in particular at a state’s highest court with discretionary or review, but it applies equally at any appellate court. She said, “If you’re arguing at our state’s highest court, you need to show up and be ready to be our thought partner. The reason that the court took your case is that it was hard and that there are some questions that they’re not sure about. The sooner that you can let us get to those and work through us, the better it’s going to be.”

From her perspective, she often said she can decide what the rule of law ought to be and still be left not knowing how that decides the case. The best advocates, in her estimation, were the ones that would help the court work through those questions, answer those questions honestly and thoughtfully, and help them come to the right decision for the right reasons. That’s a great reminder because we all want to argue our side and stick to our guns, but if you’re not helping the court reach the result that they need to reach and explaining how your side still wins under that perspective, then you’re doing a disservice. They may not want to adopt all of your arguments but that doesn’t mean you still can’t pull off a victory.

person standing inside by a window, staring at sunset
Appellate Law Reflections: It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and about five seconds to destroy it, especially in the age of social media. Be nice and respectful, especially as a young lawyer who’s trying to build a career.

I love that phraseology of being the court’s thought partner. It does dovetail back into some of the tips we have already covered and puts this image in your mind of how everyone is helping advance the case toward a decision. That’s a neat phrase. The next tip is from Professor Jonah Perlin from Georgetown. Jonah’s tip was to know your audience. We have all been given this advice to know your audience, especially when you’re writing a brief and thinking about the court or the judge that’s making the decision and what would be useful and effective in advocating before that decider.

Jonah makes the point in a broader way. He says, “You have to know who your audience is to be a good lawyer, but it could affect who you’re writing to. Your audience could be your opposing counsel, the client, or the opposing business entity for business clients.” He takes a step back and suggests thinking about who is going to be seeing your work product, who’s going to be hearing the words that come out of your mouth, and who it is that you’re trying to influence. The court is the most natural audience for what we do, but Jonah reminds us that it’s not limited to that. Another twist that he put on this was he said, “If you don’t have an audience, go and get one.”

He’s a great example of this because his suggestion is one way for lawyers to make it in the 21st century, become known, and be able to mark it tastefully is to do what he has done on social media in a positive way. It’s keeping that theme of being positive and treating folks respectfully. Jonah thinks that if you put yourself out there in an honest and truthful way that you’re trying to help people, then you can write for your own audience eventually and build a tribe that will ultimately reap a lot of rewards in your career. That’s an interesting twist on an old theme that Jonah offered us there.

What we have tried to do with this show, honestly, is to find our own tribe, and we have. The fact that we’re still here after 100 episodes speaks to that.

I’m blown away.

I am too. It’s amazing. Our next tip is from Zach Wolfe, who talks about finding your niche, whether it’s in appellate practice or something else. Zach was talking in the context, particularly, of solo practice and specializing in that. He made it broader and more applicable to appellate practice or any practice, “Find your niche. If you want to be successful, you need to have people know who you are and know what you do.” You want to be the top 1 or 2 people that pop into someone’s head when a particular problem comes up.

If you’re just an appellate lawyer, then your chances of being 1 or 2 maybe aren’t that high. If you’re an appellate lawyer who does discovery mandamuses or some particular niche, then you’re a lot more likely to be that person’s 1st or 2nd call on those issues. Developing your brand and expertise and making sure that it gets communicated out to people, “This knows what they’re talking about when it comes to X or Y,” instead of being a generic appellate lawyer may increase your chances of being a successful practitioner.

That’s great to remember because it is so easy to get lost in the idea of, “We do appeals.” “What kind of appeals?” “It’s whatever kind of appeals someone wants to bring to us.” That may be true. At the same time, it’s also not going to get you a whole lot of business because people may not think about you when it comes to a specific type of appeal that comes up. That’s a great tip from Zach.

I’m super glad we included that on the list because I’ve been thinking about that since we had that conversation with Zach. We do all know appellate lawyers who have been successful at this and developed a sub-specialty like that. Once you get there, it is an issue of personal branding. I don’t think that’s disputable. Once your name gets attached to being the discovery mandamus person, I don’t think that’s either one of us specifically, but I know a few. It is powerful for you to be top of mind and to be included in that top 1 or 2.

It can help your business development and your overall career. It’s an important thing for younger lawyers starting out to keep in mind. We develop sub-specialties naturally over time doing this work, but for younger lawyers starting out it’s good advice for those folks to keep that in the back of their minds. If there’s a specific area that you’re interested in, take a look at developing that as a sub-specialty. You might wind up being very successful at that. It would be a good move for your career.

The next tip is from Bree Buchanan, who was on our show. Her tip was to make time for human contact. Bree started off talking about how many appellate lawyers are introverts. Even introverts need human connection, or we don’t function as well as we would otherwise. I’ll raise my hand and say I’m an introvert here. I can speak to this specifically. Being married to an extrovert is a special challenge for introverts, but that’s a separate conversation.

Extroverts generally gather energy and feed off being around other people and having that human contact. Introverts don’t operate that way. One of Bree’s points was introverts aren’t as resilient. They don’t bounce back as quickly. We have longer memories of our mistakes. Maybe we take things a little more personally than extroverts do. You put that together with our natural inclination to spend more time by ourselves deep in thought, and it can lead to some problem thought patterns if we’re not careful.

This is excellent. I need to implement this. Her advice was to get a pen and a piece of paper and write down the names of three people that bring a smile to your face. Her idea is it’s okay to get on a Zoom call or something with that person, but something beyond a text, a direct message on Twitter, an email, or a Facebook message. By having that direct human interaction, you’re building yourself up. This sounds corny to say, but you’re nourishing your soul in a way that you can’t do online.

This is my personal experience. I don’t mind sharing. Bree says, “You build your resiliency and well-being capital by having these kinds of personal, positive, and meaningful interactions.” It can happen organically. It’s great, but it’s like so many things in life. You have to be purposeful and prioritize it. Think of someone that puts a smile on your face and intentionally create the space to connect with them. That’s a good move for the mental health of introverts like me.

person writing in a notebook
Appellate Law Reflections: Get a pen and a piece of paper and write down the names of three people that bring a smile to your face. Interact with them. Doing that will nourish your soul.

Particularly, COVID has illustrated that for a lot of us. Honestly, I’m glad we started this show when we did because that turned into that for me by and large for a long time because it was a break. I knew once or twice a week I was going to get an hour to talk about something else with interesting people. It was a great way to build some resilience and well-being capital, as Bree put it.

It is nice. It’s worth mentioning that. That’s what helped us get started with the show and kept it going. I’m so glad personally to be doing a whole lot more out in the real world, including some live court appearances, conferences, and so forth. It has made a big difference for me. We have talked about technology and stuff on the show before. We have everyone familiar with these tools.

It is easier to get together in a very informal way with coffee over Zoom if you want to do that. I’m trying to do more in-person myself and take Bree’s advice to heart generally because it is important, especially as long as we were stuck in that zone where we didn’t know what was going to happen. There was so much uncertainty. Having that human interaction does help increase your resiliency. It’s good for you overall. That was a great tip.

Our last formal tip comes from Professor Erin Busby. We managed to cover both Busbys on our top ten list, it is about what she calls or got from a colleague, the Arc of Despair, which sounds like the saddest Indiana Jones movie, but it’s a great term. It’s one that perfectly encapsulates something that every appellate lawyer that I know goes through on a regular basis.

Her example of the Arc of Despair is you get a new case, start working on it, and think, “This is great. We’re going to win. This is going to be awesome. I see all the problems. The trial court messed this up. There’s a 100% chance we’re going to be successful on appeal.” You start working on it, research, dig into the cases and the record, see where the other side has good points, and finally start thinking, “I need to withdraw. We’re going to lose this case. Our arguments are frivolous. There’s no way we can win. It’s horrible.”

She said, “That is the point where you are at the bottom of the Arc of Despair. You keep researching, you keep going through it, and you start writing.” Almost always, by the time you get to the point where the brief is filed, you’re thinking, “We’re going to win. This is amazing. We’re right. There’s no way we could get this wrong.” She said, “That’s the point where you’re back at the top of the Arc of Despair, and then comes oral argument. There may be multiple Arcs of Despair in the oral argument process.”

I have personally felt this and gone through this with other attorneys that I’ve helped get ready for oral argument. Her takeaway from that was, “It’s an important part of the process. You can’t have a good brief until you’ve gone all the way to the bottom of the Arc of Despair and seen all the problems because you won’t have dealt with everything that the other side has to throw at you and then you won’t incorporate those into your brief.”

As a professor, she’s had a number of students come to her and say, “I was working on a brief. I went through the Arc of Despair. It was terrible.” She said that it’s her best advice to students. Know that’s part of the process to get the best possible product. You have to go through the wilderness to come back out to the clearing at the end of it and feel good about what you’re filing. I did not have that term in my vocabulary, but I’ve used it a number of times since her episode because it is 100% a description of the process of about everything I’ve ever written.

When I heard her describe that arc that way, it made perfect sense to me. It had never occurred to me before, but it is spot on 100%. My goal in a case is always by the time I finish a brief or I’m finished preparing for an oral argument, I want to hit that high point in the arc again. The way I had described that to myself in somewhat colorful terms was I always wind up believing in my own BS, but it’s not BS. It’s more than that. To me, this is a perfect description of that mental process that we go through because you’re having to not only build up your side but also take apart the other side.

You would like to think there’s a right answer somewhere, but we know that as lawyers we work in the gray area more often than not. There’s always room for criticism. There’s always a counterargument. There’s a reason why we have the sense in the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court because there’s not always a right answer. That’s a very useful construct to keep in mind as we go through our day-to-day work.

That takes us to the end of our tips. We had more than ten. It’s not truly a top ten list. One thing that I intend to do is we’re going to have the videos of those recordings edited. At least once a day, we’re going to release these tips, possibly in order, but I won’t guarantee that so you can get your personal view of exactly what our guests had to say and don’t rely on our paraphrasing of it. We have done a fair job of it and offered some commentary on it along the way.

Follow us on Twitter if you’re not already @TexAppLawPod and keep an eye on our account. We will post the videos of these. I want to say thanks again to all of our readers for the confidence you’ve shown us and the fact that you’re willing to spend time with us. Please continue reading and telling friends. If you find the show valuable, we would love to keep doing it.

There’s no indication or reason why we wouldn’t keep doing it. I look forward to the next 100 episodes. We still manage to find things to talk about even after doing this over 100 times with episodes we’ve got coming up and in the can. Thank you all for your willingness to spend time with us. We appreciate you as our audience. We will look forward to talking again soon.

In closing, we didn’t cover my favorite war story. It was from Kent Rutter. Go back in our back catalog and read Kent’s war story because it was probably one of the best.

We didn’t get into war stories because of the retelling of those. There would have been something lost in the translation.

That’s why I’m going to put that out there.

I’ll add one that stuck with me and that’s Mark Trachtenberg‘s war story about the longest appellate argument ever. Go back and read that. Maybe we will add the videos of those as bonus content. Jody, I appreciate you. I enjoy doing this with you.

Same here.

Keep on keeping on.


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