Missouri Injury Law Blog

Before you consider appealing a court decision, you should know about appeal bonds. They exist as a deterrent to frivolous appeals. As a type of surety bond, an appeal bond requires the party filing the appeal to pay the cost of the original judgment—if the appeal fails—and costs of appealing the ruling.

Essentially, surety bonds are three-party agreements between a surety company, a principal (the entity doing the work) and the obligee (the entity requiring the bond). Surety bonds help ensure that all applicable laws and regulations are followed, and act as a way to seek economic redress for those harmed.

Since both plaintiffs and defendants can appeal a decision, any party may be subject to purchasing a bond required for an appeal. Surety and insurance companies sell surety bonds in Missouri, and act as third parties between the court and appealing party. Most importantly, they guarantee that the court will be paid for the original judgment if the appeal fails. The cost depends on the first ruling of the court, and likely will cost the amount from that ruling plus interest and court costs.

Appeal bonds also protect the legal system in another way. When a party cannot pay a court-ordered sum, filing for an appeal gives them time. But filing an appeal that is time consuming but sure to be unsuccessful loses its luster thanks to appeal bonds. With the added cost of appealing and the original judgment fees, appeal bonds keep defendants and plaintiffs from filing useless appeals.

For example, when a defendant in a personal injury law case loses the judgment and owes a large sum to the plaintiff, they might consider filing an appeal simply to postpone paying the court-ordered amount. To file the appeal, the defendant must buy an appeal bond from surety. If the appeal is unsuccessful, the defendant must then pay the sum defined by the first proceeding and additional fees for the filing an appeal.

The party for whom the court ruled in favor gets a cushion from appeal bonds, too. If a losing party goes bankrupt during the appeals process—and therefore cannot pay its legal debts—the appeal bond ensures recompense to the winning party. If the defendant goes belly up while the court considers the appeal, the plaintiff still receives its payment as mandated by the appeal bond.
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GUEST AUTHOR: Matt Bruns - matthew@suretybonds.com

For most attorneys, legal research is a labrynth of databases and special queries. Two behemoth companies have dominated the market for about the past 20 years or so: Westlaw and Lexis. Some have argued they are a duopoloy. It wasn't until a couple years ago with the advent of public.resource.org that there was a glimmer of hope that the corpus of legal decisions would be more readily available to attorneys that sis not want to spend money on Westlaw or Lexis. The difficulty is that Westlaw and Lexis has years years of content from whic both have built overwhelmingly powerful and knowledgable search engines. Users can search issues, find news, and search periodicals and law journals. Usually these are arranged in databases which are not intuitive to search. Which as much as they offer, its like using a backhoe when a hand shovel will do. This kind of tool, with fancy queries and millions and millions of documents just doesn't fit within the typical practice of a personal injury attorney. Recently, however, two newcomers - Bloomberg and Google - are making this promised opening of the legal research market more of a reality. Bloomberg Law is a new competitor that promises more than just legal research. Bloomberg, a news service, will soon be going right after Lexis and Westlaw by offering legal search, a legal citator to rank relevant law, a legal digest and news stories relevant to your legal search. Then there is Google scholar. Google is the king of search and it shows in their search engine. Results are accurate and the interface is easy to use. Google Scholar also offers a nice citator service here but lacks the ability to search more than just primary law. These two newcomers offer nice packages. Bloomberg will be a fee service and is not yet available. Google Scholar is free and already available. Bloonberg is going after the pay services and google is trying to open the market. Regardless of the promise both lack legal search features which are valuable to plaintiff attorneys. Both lack a direct jury verdict search feature and both lack any way to search expert witness reports. To plaintiff's attorneys these are valuable features. One helps determine the value of a case, and one helps make the case. The legal world is always a few years behind in technology. Legal research is no different. Attorneys acan only benefit from new players in the market. Here's hoping we will see some provider offer expanisive search with features that are valuable to planitiff attorneys.