If you need to hire an attorney to handle a criminal appeal, you should gather some information regarding the attorney's: 1) prior appellate practice experience; 2) Areas of substantive expertise; 3) Academic background; and 4) Prior judicial clerkship experience. The relevance of prior experience should be obvious, and it also makes sense to retain an appellate lawyer who has knowledge in the same area of law that the appeal involves.

With respect to the third factor, a lot of people (including a lot of lawyers) think that law school grades are the best indicators of what kind of lawyer someone will be. I don't agree with that view. Nonetheless, I do think there is a correlation between doing exceptionally well in school and being a very good appellate lawyer. Perhaps this is because appellate law is the area of practice that is most like law school. Similarly, people who have served clerkships in Federal or State appellate courts tend, I believe, to be better appellate lawyers, perhaps in part because law clerks draft judicial opinions for their judges and thus have a unique opportunity to see the appellate process from the judge's point of view.

In any event, here are my answers to the above questions. First, I have handled more than 25 criminal appeals, many on a "cold" record (meaning that I did not handle the trial and was retained only for the appeal). I have presented oral argument more than a dozen times, including before the Eighth and Tenth Circuit U.S. Courts of Appeals, the Kansas Court of Appeals, and the Kansas Supreme Court.

Second, as you already know, my substantive expertise is in criminal law.

Third, I received a B.S. in Chemistry with Distinction from the University of Kansas and went on to receive my J.D. with High Honors at Duke University, a national top-10 law school. At Duke, I was selected to membership in The Order of the Coif (a national honor society whose membership is selected only from the top 10% of member schools' graduating students), and received the American Jurisprudence Award for being the year's top student in both Federal Courts and Federal Criminal Law. I also was elected to serve on the prestigious Duke Law Journal after my first year, and was an Articles Editor for that journal during my final year of law school.

Finally, I served a judicial clerkship after graduating law school with Judge James K. Logan on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado. That Court hears all appeals in Federal cases originating out of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico.

A final note: the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has begun making both appellate briefs and live recordings of oral arguments available on its web site. This is a great tool for you, the consumer. If you are debating whether to hire me or someone else to handle a Federal appeal, just go to the Eighth Circuit web site, type in my name, and you can see some of my work product and actually hear some of my arguments. Do the same for anyone else you're considering hiring.