Brief QC overview

On June 2, 2025, the Sixth Circuit rolled out its newest service, Brief Quality Control, or Brief QC. Brief QC is designed to prevent non-compliance issues with appellate briefs before they are formally filed with the Sixth Circuit. It is an additional step in the traditional ECF filing procedures that flags certain compliance issues.

The aim of Brief QC is to reduce the administrative burden placed on the Clerk’s Office and practitioners. As mentioned in the Brief QC announcement, the Sixth Circuit issued more than 700 deficiency notices in 2024, delaying cases and posing significant other issues.Continue Reading The Sixth Circuit’s goal of quality control

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

We’ve written before about the heartfelt pain appellate lawyers experience when a case is dismissed after briefing and oral argument at the Ohio Supreme Court. In the first instance, it happened for a lack of a final appealable order. In the second, the court ultimately decided the case had already been mooted. It turns out there’s a third possibility — a jurisdictional defect.
Continue Reading A pain worse than losing (Part 3): A jurisdictional defect