Wallace Jefferson, former Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court and newly installed President of the American Law Institute (ALI), joins Jody Sanders and Todd Smith for a wide-ranging conversation on appellate practice, judicial leadership, and legacy. Chief Justice Jefferson, a partner at Alexander Dubose & Jefferson LLP, discusses ALI’s mission to modernize
Opposing counsel once called Chris Schandevel a “brief-writing ninja.” He took it as a compliment. Years later, as he considered ways to add value to attorneys coming up behind him, Chris channeled that nickname into a side job: Brief-Writing Ninja, his training platform to help lawyers improve their writing skills. Why? Because good writing
“We have just anything you could think of,” Amy Small says of the Texas State Law Library, where she is executive director. Open to all—no attorney license required—the library serves everyday Texans and the Supreme Court alike. In this episode, hosts Jody Sanders and Todd Smith invite Amy to unpack the library’s often-overlooked resources:
Election law in Texas is “very demanding” and “stressful because of the accelerated nature of the calendar,” says Elizabeth D. Alvarez. Elizabeth is head of civil litigation/election litigation at Guest & Gray and a 12-year election litigation practitioner who has represented state parties, national parties, and candidates on both sides of the aisle. She
Judge Amy Clark Meachum, the Local Administrative Judge for Travis County, joins hosts Todd Smith and Jody Sanders to unpack recent legislation affecting the Texas judiciary and what it means for how courts operate today. Judge Meachum traces the escalating reporting and accountability mandates imposed on Texas trial courts through the 88th and 89th
When a lawyer messes up by using an AI platform that produces mistakes, they might get sanctioned by a judge. When a judge messes up using an AI platform, “it could become precedent. So, it’s a much different conversation.” Judge Scott Schlegel, of Louisiana’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, speaks from his experience
The final version of rewritten Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 166a—the summary judgment rule—became effective March 1, 2026. In this episode, Michael Duncan, an appellate and motions practitioner in Austin who clerked for a Texas Supreme Court justice, unpacks the updated rule with hosts Todd Smith and Jody Sanders. Together, they examine what
In this episode, hosts Todd Smith and Jody Sanders share their list of crowdsourced “pet issues” that appellate courts could address to make practitioners’ lives easier. Their goals, Todd explains, are to both identify areas for improvement and also to give them an opportunity to flesh out those topics in later episodes. If you’re a
In this episode, we examine Texas’s permissive appeals statute and the rulemaking process that shapes how it operates in practice. To guide the discussion, hosts Todd Smith and Jody Sanders welcome Rich Phillips of Holland & Knight, who serves on the Texas Supreme Court Advisory Committee and recently presented a paper on permissive appeals.
Keep your brief to 10,000 words, and you’ll get more investment from Texas appellate justices. Those are just a few words of wisdom from Justice David Gunn in this conversation with hosts Todd Smith and Jody Sanders. After a clerkship, where he observed lawyers making mistakes and judges making decisions, Justice Gunn spent over