© 2017 The Texas Lawbook.
By Brooks Igo
(Sept. 29) – Kilpatrick Townsend has recently enhanced its litigation team in Dallas with the addition of appellate pro Jason Steed as counsel.
Steed was most recently at Bell Nunnally. He says though his former firm is great, he was looking for a bigger platform.
“It will now be much easier for me to handle appeals from coast to coast,” he added.
A former English professor, Steed says most cases are interesting to him because they involve disputes over language such as interpreting the use of a comma in a contract or the meaning of “that” in a statute. A quote from the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter headlines his blog: “All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made.”
One appeal he has handled involved the Federal Arbitration Act and the question of whether it allows a court to vacate an arbitration award based on the arbitrator’s “manifest disregard of the law.”
“The answer could affect thousands of arbitrations across the country, and there’s still a circuit split over whether the answer is yes or no,” he says. “I’d love to be the guy who takes that issue to the Supreme Court someday.”
Steed was also involved in the historic same-sex-divorce and same-sex-marriage litigation in Texas. In a pending matter, he has a cert petition asking the Supreme Court of Texas to reconsider and revise its qualified-immunity doctrine.
With nearly 14,000 followers, Steed is a prolific and influential member of #appellatetwitter, a community of appellate wonks on the social media site. He uses his handle @5thCircAppeals to weigh in on important cases and legal writing techniques such as favorite fonts, the proper use of footnotes and whether or not to use two spaces after a period.
The issues before the U.S. Supreme Court that Steed is watching are whether the Court can control partisan gerrymandering; whether cell phone records are protected by the Fourth Amendment; and whether the First Amendment can protect a religious cake-maker from having to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple.
In the business world, Steed says the hot topics include employee class actions, the Patent Trade Office’s ability to determine the validity of existing patents and the scope of whistleblower protections.
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