Inadmissible: Appellate Case System Changes

Appellate lawyers and judges might get excited about tweaks in the works for Texas appellate courts’ case management system. All of the state’s appellate courts use the Texas Appeals Management and E-filing System. Appellate clerks, who make up the TAMES governance committee, review and prioritize enhancement requests for the system, according to an August 2014 director’s report to the Texas Judicial Council. The report said that the committee prioritized two major enhancements for judges and lawyers. “Auto-linking of citations” would allow a “properly formatted cite” to link automatically to the case in Westlaw or LexisNexis. The feature also would “allow attorneys to cite and have links automatically generated to the clerk record and court reporter records.” An “attorney access portal” would give appellate lawyers a secure and access-controlled portal to review all of their cases’ documents and clerk and reporter records. TAMES has allowed the state’s appellate courts to achieve “the vision of a case being adjudicated without ever having been kept in paper,” said the director’s report.

Paul Coggins in Acting Gig

Paul Coggins, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, and partner in Dallas’ Locke Lord, plays a demolitionist in “9th Floor: Quest for the Ancient Relic,” a movie that film producer (and Dallas lawyer) Sally Helppie said is scheduled for release on DVD and Blu-Ray on Sept. 30. If you want to catch Coggins in Helppie’s movie before the release, go to video-on-demand channels for Verizon FIOS, Comcast or DirecTV, where it’s already available. Helppie, who is of counsel at Dallas’ Vincent Lopez Serafino Jenevein and the president of Dallas-based Advocate Pictures, said the movie stars Jonny Cruz, who, with his role on Robert Rodriguez’s new TV show “Matador,” will probably grab a bit more name recognition than Coggins in worlds outside the Texas legal one. Helppie, who used to work with Coggins at a law firm, has reported previously that her lawyer friends such as Coggins agreed to appear in the film pro bono.

Reporting Work Time