Roderick Ford sued TD Ameritrade for fraud in the execution of stock trades placed through the company’s online platform.  TD Ameritrade does not execute trades itself but routes them to high-speed trading venues.  Then it receives payments from the trading venues for those referrals.  The “duty of best execution” requires that brokers use reasonable efforts…

Quoting judicial opinions can authenticate and bolster arguments in a brief. The problem is that direct quotes can get cumbersome. The opinion you are quoting may have quoted from another decision, which may have quoted from yet another. And so on.

Spend some time with Rules 5.2(e) and 10.6 of the Bluebook and you can…

Appellants try to get trial court judgments reversed. The basic job of appellate judges is to decide, case-by-case, whether a trial judge made an error significant enough to require that his or her judgment be overturned.

The tests appellate judges apply to make that determination are called standards of review. The applicable standard of review…

Missouri appellate courts take the structure of an argument heading very, very seriously. For decades the Missouri Supreme Court has prescribed the format of “points relied on” and insisted on compliance. Briefs have been stricken and appeals dismissed for wayward headings.

Lawyers have been rebuked in published opinions for presuming to take liberties. I know.…