Oral argument on April 7th: come see me crash and burn?

Posted Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 by Gregory Forman
Filed under Miscellaneous, Of Interest to Family Law Attorneys, South Carolina Specific

I’ve been handling appeals since I graduated law school, including drafting two appeal briefs in 1991 before being sworn in as a member of the Pennsylvania bar, and successfully briefing and arguing the appeal in Landry v. Hilton Head Plantation Prop. Owner’s Ass’n, 317 S.C. 200, 452 S.E.2d 619 (Ct.App.1994) within two years of being licensed in South Carolina.

I have argued appeals for trials other attorneys handled.  I have argued appeals for personal injury trials I handled.  I have argued appeals for family court motions I handled.  I have successfully appealed from family court trials I have handled in which there was no oral argument.

Yet, in nineteen-plus years of practice, I have never gotten to argue an appeal from a family court trial in which I made the record.  This will change on April 7, 2011 at 10:30 a.m. when I argue the appeal of Dulaney v. Dulaney before the South Carolina Court of Appeals at the Charleston Music Hall at 37 John Street.  This oral argument is being presented on behalf of the Charleston School of Law as a learning experience for part of the law school’s Professionalism Series.  Briefs from this appeal can be located here.

Because I was the trial attorney for this appeal, I have been able to raise and preserve a number of novel legal issues.  Oral argument is, for me, the most exciting experience in the practice of law.  I am quite thrilled to be arguing this appeal where my family and colleagues can observe and in which local law students, most of whom have never seen oral argument, will be attending.  This doesn’t mean I won’t go down in flames.

Readers of this blog are welcome to attend and (quietly) cheer me on or boo me as their feelings about me dictate.