Build Your House, Part 3 – Quality Assurance
Brian Foote, software architect
“If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture.”
In response to last week’s Bard of the Bar post (Build Your House Part 2 – Blueprint), a colleague who receives this blog asked me to clarify what I meant by “annotated outline of the brief” in task five of the Blueprint Time Estimation Checklist. I would like to share my answer, and expound upon it a bit, in this post.
By “Create an annotated outline of the brief,” I mean that for each section of your brief outline, attach a list of cases, legal points, and/or a list of key facts that support it. These items rise out of the four tasks listed below:
Review the appellate record
Identify legal issues
Conduct legal research
Refine legal issues based upon research
To continue our building metaphor, these four tasks are the materials we gather in preparation for building. Task five, the outline, is the construction of the structural skeleton of your brief. Annotations to this skeleton are quality assurance, the measurements we make to warrant our building will stand strong upon completion and endure the rigors of inspection.
This blog is turning into a conversation! I think that is great.
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