Words, Words, Words

For several years now, Texas appellate lawyers have had to swing both ways. No, get your mind out of the gutter, that's not what we're talking about. We're referring to words and pages.

Since 1998, federal appellate courts have measured the length of briefs in words: 14,000 for a principal brief, and 7,000 for a reply brief. (Petitions for rehearing are an exception, at 15 pages.) Gone have been the days when you could play with margins, typefaces, footnotes, and the like to cram the square peg of your overlength brief into the round hole of a page limit. With the switch to words has come a font-size requirement: 14-point type for ordinary text and 12-point type for footnotes.