Federal & State Appellate Practice

Stone & Baxter’s appellate lawyers have significant experience representing clients throughout the appeals process. Perhaps most importantly, they understand that an appeal is not merely an opportunity to retry a case to a different court. Rather, appellate advocacy is a specialized and separate discipline.

Our Appellate Approach

Specifically, our appellate lawyers get up to speed and master the trial record quickly; they’ve mastered technical and unforgiving appellate rules that vary from forum to forum; and they have significant experience adapting the trial experience to a special appellate audience, be it a single judge or a panel of judges. And more often than not, our appellate lawyers are condensing years of trial history into an almost impossibly narrow space for briefing and argument.

Our Typical Appeals

Our appellate matters arise in one of two different ways. First, we regularly represent parties on appeal after representing them in the trial court, and we know that a winning appellate case often begins at the trial court level. Second, we’re also brought into a case only after trial, for the specific purpose of handling the appeal. In the former, our appellate experience is beneficial for preserving issues for appeal. In the latter, we’ve found that appeals can benefit from a fresh look, whether trial counsel from another firm gets us involved or our own trial team solicits that second look internally.

Finally, given the nature of our practice, our appellate cases vary almost as widely as the cases that we try, especially for our high-stakes, complex, or “bet-the-company” cases where appeals are more common, if not guaranteed. To name a few, our appeals involve all manner of commercial litigation issues, foreclosure and confirmation issues, shareholder and director fights, construction disputes, regulatory challenges, constitutional matters, and the like.

Practice Groups