Last week, I completed my first solo appeal before the Court of Appeal of Ontario. My clients were appealing the decision of a Trial Judge following a forty-three day trial, which lasted nine weeks over the course of three calendar years. When I was retained, I was presented with over 150 trial exhibits, which included various correspondence, expert reports as to technical drawings and complicated engineering concepts, and spanned a total of fourteen volumes and approximately 10,000-12,000 PDF pages. The transcripts from the trial alone consisted of approximately 5,500 PDF pages.
Over the course of the past eight months, I had the pleasure and honour of preparing appeal materials and getting ready for the oral argument itself. These are the most important lessons I learned in doing this as a sole practitioner, which I believe may be valuable to the readers of this section:
Please log in to read the full article.