The Sea Coast Echo reports that the appellate record has gone missing in an appeal involving the incorporation of Diamondhead, which is a community in Hancock County near I-10. The Supreme Court is unhappy:
Justice Jess Dickinson issued an order Wednesday demanding that each attorney representing the Diamondhead incorporation opponents file a memorandum explaining why they failed to comply with the Mississippi Rules of Appellant Procedure.
My favorite part of the article is this nugget:
Attorney William Kulick said he vaguely remembers boxes of records, but he does not know what happened to them.
“I mailed them to my clients in Jackson,” he said at the hearing. “I assumed they complied with the rules.
I sure hope that by “mailed” he means something with a tracking number, or the buck will probably stop before Jackson.
But should the Supreme Court still be using 20th Century techniques for compiling and allowing attorneys to review appeals records? I can understand why in 1990 the lower court clerk compiled the record and mailed it to the Supreme Court clerk who then allowed the attorneys to check out the record and review it. But do they still do it that way in 2010? How quaint.
I remember working on an appeal around ten years ago while I was still at Baker Donelson. As is customary, we checked the appeal record out from the court clerk. The record had so many volumes that it had its own cart for wheeling it around the office. You could literally hear the record coming.
You would think that in this day and age the record would be scanned and disk(s) mailed to the parties’ attorneys. A scanned record would be more convenient for the lawyers and the Court. I haven’t had an appeal in a while so maybe it is now done this way. If not, it should be.
Update (12-23-10 10:45 a.m.): The record is no longer missing and is back in the chancery clerk’s office.