Appellate
Helping you weigh the costs, risks and rewards of any appeal
Capabilities at a glance
- An appellate team that has handled over 500 appeals in the past 15 years in reviewing courts across the country, at every level of the state and federal systems, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
- Broad coverage, suited to your business. Our appellate professionals are subject matter generalists, equally comfortable across diverse areas of the law.
- Holistic legal support with your interests at heart, including advice as to when further litigation is best avoided.
- Attorneys with national coverage and experience, including several who have clerked for appellate judges at the federal and state level.
Guiding you through the appeals process from start to finish
Whether on the winning or losing side in the lower court, facing an appeal means deciding what is most important and what can be left behind. Both appellants and respondents need to ask if an appeal is worth fighting and what the risks might be. Quarles’ Appellate team offers experienced counsel to help you answer these vital questions. Our appellate lawyers have handled appeals at every level of the state and federal systems. We offer you a fresh set of eyes on which issues to pursue—or not to pursue. We provide guidance to navigate appellate rules and procedure, and on how to best construct briefs, conduct moot court practice sessions and present an effective oral argument. We work closely with trial counsel in virtually any area of practice involving litigation and do so in reviewing courts across the country.
An Appellate team deeply embedded in the courts
- Our experienced Appellate attorneys have appeared in every federal circuit court of appeals, handling 375 federal appeals over the past decade.
- Our federal Appellate practice has particularly deep experience in the Seventh, Ninth, Eleventh and Federal Circuits.
- Our lawyers are at the forefront of shaping state law, generating hundreds of published decisions over the same period. Our state Appellate practice focuses on Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. And our appellate attorneys regularly brief and argue in the highest courts of all five states, including 12 Wisconsin Supreme Court arguments in the past 11 years.
- In both federal and state appellate courts we maintain a robust amicus practice, making clients’ voices heard on the issues that matter most to them at the highest level of our judicial systems.
Experience
Because appellate work is a procedural specialty, not tied to any particular subject matter, our appellate experience encompasses a wide range of substantive law, including:
- Antitrust
- Arbitration
- Bankruptcy and creditors’ rights
- Class actions
- Constitutional law
- Contracts and commercial law
- Environmental
- Insurance
- Intellectual property
- Labor and employment
- Libel and slander
- Municipal law
- Product liability
- Public utilities
- Real estate
- Tax
- Trusts and estates
- Zoning and land use
In short, our appellate experience is as diverse as the clients we serve.
Successes
- In a negligence case, we won reversal of an adverse summary judgment decision in the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, then affirmance at the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, ensuring the terms of our client’s contract were appropriately honored and protecting the client from approximately $900,000 in liability in connection with property damage caused by a fire. And that was just one of three cases we won at Wisconsin’s highest court that year.
- In another, we won a favorable answer from the Wisconsin Supreme Court on a question certified by the Seventh Circuit: The high court ruled that wine dealers do not fall within the scope of the Wisconsin Fair Dealership Law and thus confirmed our client had no continuing obligations to downstream distributors it had terminated.
- In the third, involving a foreclosure on one of the most valuable single-family residential properties in Wisconsin, we successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s instruction limiting the amount our client, the guarantor of the mortgage, could be credited for the sheriff’s sale price of the property. In doing so, we protected our client from an astronomical payment not reflective of the property’s substantial fair market value.
