Come On in, the Water's Fine

I welcome my friends at Orgain Bell and Tucker LLP to the Texas Ninth Court of Appeals part of the blogosphere with their new blog, Navigating the Ninth, which I have put on our Link List, and wish them luck in helping to keep people informed about an important and neglected part of the Texas court system. The Ninth Court of Appeals covers ten counties:

• Hardin
• Jasper
• Jefferson- county seat Beaumont, where the Ninth Court of Appeals has its offices, courtrooms, and chambers- Jefferson is the second largest county in the Supreme Judicial District and is the primary home of Orgain Bell and Tucker LLP.
• Liberty
• Montgomery- county seat Conroe, the largest county in the Supreme Judicial District where I live and practice
• Newton
• Orange
• Polk
• San Jacinto
• Tyler

Our Montgomery County out here continues to be one of the fastest growing parts of the U.S. and Jefferson County, the main location for Orgain Bell and Tucker, is an absolutely key area for the petrochemical industry and for maritime trade.

Associated Press 2014 Style Guide and Media Guide Is Newly Out

You can be an acceptable, even good legal writer without this book, but I find it to be a handy, quick tool to guide me where advice from higher sources is unclear or even contradictory. It is relatively up-to-date. AP's got to solve novel style disputes many times a year. And, if you think about it, AP style almost never looks weird because we live in a sea of it. The good American newspapers you read use it, traditional news organization pay attention to it, and they have a bias for clarity and consistency. Clarity and consistency are things that nearly every piece of legal writing needs more of.