WELCOME BACK!

Welcome to the revamped 10 O'clock blog! We made a few changes to the format, added a counter and some great new links, and even included an option to be notified whenever there's a new posting. Pretty rad.

In an era where the imperialist whores have tried their damndest to obliterate our 10:00 sanity-sustaining ritual, we can now fight back in style. So fire up your most random stories, thoughts, politically-charged insults, and law-related questions, and let's kick the whores right in the mouth!

(I mean by blogging.)

What "internet ban"?

The 10 O'Clock

Appeal bonds

If anyone else in this office ever expresses an interest in appeals, they should be aware of how appeal bonds work.

Appeals from county courts are addressed by CRCP 411. An plaintiff appellant is required to post a bond to cover the costs of the appeal. If a defendant appeals, he is required to post a bond to cover the amount of the appeal and also the judgment. If a plaintiff loses a case and appeal an award of costs/fees, the plaintiff would have to include that cost amount in its appeal bond. All of this, however, is apparently subject to the trial court's discretion. The court can waive the bond requirement and can set the amount at less than the judgment. Once the appeal bond has been posted and approved by the trial court, or once the court has waived the bond requirement the execution on the judgment is stayed.


Appeals from District court are governed by the appellate rules. CAR 7 and 8 govern appeal bonds and stays. The appellant has to post a cost bond of $250 to proceed with the appeal and a separate supersedeas bond (generallythe amount of the judgement) is required to stay execution. The court again has discretion in both of these matters. The stay of exectuion is not automatic, like it is in county court. The appellant must move the court for a stay under CAR8.

Under 10-4-701 the self-insurer is liable for up to $50K for medical expenses and $50K for rehabilitation expenses per injured person.
There was an amendment in 1996, which provides that if you exceed the $50K for the meds, you can use any remaining portion of the rehab. If you exceed the $50K for the rehab, however, you cannot use unspent medical. Thus, you need to be wary of defendants trying to portray your expenses at rehab and capping out at $50K. Also defense attorneys may cite law that pre-dates the 1996 amendment to try and cap out our med recovery at $50K.

What is rehab and what is medical? That is gray area with cases all across the board. If you want to lump your expenses into medical you can quote Dean v. Allstate, 878 F.Supp 1397 (1993) which provides that post-surgery or post-injury recuperation treatment such as Physical Therapy would be medical and OT, speech therapy and other training would be rehab.

Private Lessons on Direct

Today we attended the New Trial Lawyer Intervention hosted by County Judge. It turns out County Judge mentors a lot of new attorneys; it’s kind of his thing. He particularly reaches out to women and minorities. Fortunately, we have one of those in our firm, so we all rode her coattails into Courtroom X this afternoon for a lesson on direct examination. County Judge gave us the following advice:

1. Primarily use journalistic questions: who, what, when, why, where, how. If your mouth is not making a ‘w’ sound, it’s probably not a good question.

2. Always use open-ended questions (except when laying foundation).

3. Maintain control over the witness by using focus tools when the witness starts to stray, e.g. “tell us more about . . .” “show me . . .” “describe . . .”

4. Transitions help focus a line of questioning on one particular subject. Examples:
a. “I want to talk to you about your experience . . .”
b. The loop back: “You said there was a red Ford parked on the road; can you describe the car in front of it? Behind it?”

5. The focus of a direct examination should be on the witness, not the examiner. This is in contrast to cross examination, when the focus is on the questions the examiner is propounding.

6. Only ask questions with a goal in mind; do not ask superfluous questions.

7. When laying a foundation, it’s okay to ask leading questions. For example: “Do you watch Grey’s Anatomy?” I’m laying a foundation for questions about an episode of GA.

When propounding discovery you should avoid asking for "the number of times", because it's easy for the responding party to reasonably state that they don't know the number. Instead ask for "the approximate number of times". That should force them to provide at least an estimation or face a motion to compel.

No one has posted in two weeks. I think the blog has failed.

Driving Mr. Daisy

I came up with a new game today: any time you drive somewhere with the boss, count his traffic violations. To make it fair, you should then divide by the amount of time you were in the car (not including post-accident time, should the surrounding traffic fail to realize that your boss is within striking range). Whoever comes up with the highest coefficient (and lives), wins.