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Brad Hughes

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Brad is a partner in Porter Wright’s Litigation Department and chairs the firm’s Appellate Practice Group. He represents clients in appeals, original actions and complex commercial litigation. Brad has assisted oil and gas clients and electric utilities in appeals before the Supreme Court of Ohio and in regulatory matters before the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.

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As Ohio attorneys who focus on appellate issues, one of the trusty treatises we often consult in our practice is former First District Court of Appeals Judge Mark Painter’s seminal Ohio Appellate Practice handbook, published by Baldwin. If you don’t have it in your library but enjoy appellate work, we highly recommend it. And for years, in the section pertaining to administrative appeals taken under Ohio’s Administrative Procedure Act, commonly known as “Chapter 119 appeals,” Judge Painter’s treatise has noted that certain administrative appeals in Ohio had to be brought in Franklin County, including appeals regarding examinations and licensing by state agencies, and appeals of adjudicatory decisions by the Liquor Control Commission, State Medical Board Chiropractic Examining Board, or Board of Nursing.…

Continue Reading Ohio General Assembly expands venues for administrative appeals

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced some new flexibility into the traditionally rigid legal workplace. For those working in downtown offices, the traffic on the daily commute was certainly better. And remote work options allowed counsel to take depositions from the comfort of their home offices. Got a hearing coming up on a motion? Fine, let’s conduct it via Zoom. Big oral argument coming up? No problem — the court says that can be done on Microsoft Teams. The pandemic and related stay-at-home orders certainly required some unprecedented understanding and adaptability from participants in the legal system, be they lawyers, judges, clients or court staff.…

Continue Reading Two recent decisions by Ohio appellate courts caution counsel against undue reliance upon health emergencies to delay trials

Imagine that your client has been sued for damages in federal court. In a motion for summary judgment, you assert what you believe to be a valid and compelling legal defense, such as the plaintiff’s failure to exhaust administrative remedies. There are no facts in dispute regarding the defense—it presents a purely legal question for the judge to resolve before any trial takes place. Yet the judge denies your dispositive motion, and so you proceed to a jury trial, where your client is hit with a substantial verdict. As you consider post-trial motions, you may wonder: must you re-brief the purely legal defense in a Rule 50 motion — even though the judge previously denied it on summary judgment — in order to preserve that issue for appeal?…

Continue Reading U.S. Supreme Court agrees to resolve Dupree circuit split

In mid-December 2022, Larry Ebner, the well-known appellate advocate behind Capital Appellate Advocacy in Washington, D.C., published an op-ed at Law360 titled Federal Courts Should Follow Supreme Court’s Amicus Stance. In this op-ed, Ebner noted that the U.S. Supreme Court had announced revisions to its rules, effective Jan. 1, 2023, that eliminate the requirement for amici curiae to obtain the parties’ consent, or the court’s permission, to file their amicus briefs. Ebner went on to argue that the corresponding rules for the federal circuit courts (see FRAP 29) should similarly be amended to eliminate the consent requirement for amicus briefs.…

Continue Reading Changing rules to eliminate consent requirements for amicus briefs – how far will they go?

Members of our firm’s Appellate Practice Group are consulted regularly by our colleagues about procedural issues arising from so-called interlocutory appeals. In other words, appeals taken (or attempted to be taken) from decisions by trial courts at some point before final judgment.

Continue Reading The tricky business of appealing from decisions granting preliminary injunctive relief

As many readers of this blog likely will be aware, the doctrine of administrative deference — the extent to which courts may properly defer to agencies’ interpretations of statutes and/or rules — has been a hot topic in recent years in the United States Supreme Court.…

Continue Reading Appellate practitioners take note: Ohio Supreme Court has rejected mandatory deference to agencies’ interpretations of rules and statutes

Not long ago, one of the American Arbitration Association’s vice presidents stopped by our firm to bring us up to speed on some recent AAA developments and the new AAA rules in effect for commercial cases, effective Sept. 1, 2022. We at Ohio Appellate Insights think one of the topics she mentioned during her presentation — “AAA’s Optional Appellate Arbitration Rules” — is worth noting for our audience of appellate practitioners.
Continue Reading Don’t forget about AAA’s Optional Appellate Arbitration Rules

As we approach the end of an election year that includes multiple Ohio Supreme Court races, we know that the Justices of the Ohio Supreme Court and their law clerks are hard at work drafting opinions in all cases that have already been orally argued. This diligence is so that the court’s opinions in those cases can be voted on and released before the election may cause changes to the bench in January. We can expect several eventful days between now and the end of the year, when a flurry of consequential new opinions in pending cases surely will be issued.

Tuesday, October 11, was one of those eventful days.…

Continue Reading An eventful day at the Ohio Supreme Court

Ohio’s final appealable order statute, Ohio Revised Code Section 2505.02, is complex and fraught with traps for the unwary. It can be difficult for counsel to discern or advise their clients with any high degree of confidence whether a given interlocutory decision by a trial judge is subject to immediate appeal, or whether that fight must await an appeal after final judgment. One specific context in which this vexing issue can arise relates to discovery orders compelling the production of allegedly privileged information, or the production of information potentially subject to the attorney work-product doctrine.
Continue Reading Appealing discovery orders compelling production of confidential information

In April 2022, the Ohio Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in City of Maple Heights v. Netflix, Inc. & Hulu, LLC, a certified question case. Such cases are governed by Section 9 of the Ohio Supreme Court’s Rules of Practice and only come up a few times a year. …
Continue Reading Ohio Supreme Court set to answer certified question from federal court