Brief Petitions for Appeals

Under procedural law, no such concept as a “brief petition for appeal” exists. In practice, however, a brief appeal is in fact a rather commonplace phenomenon for lawyers.

By law, a court ruling is issued immediately after a case is examined. The operative part is announced on the spot, at that very hearing. As for the write-up of the analytical portion, it may be delayed for an indefinite period of time. Under civil proceedings, the wait is five days, while in the case of commercial cases, it's ten days.

In practice, the aforementioned wait periods are only adhered to by commercial courts. General jurisdiction courts prepare complete, well-founded rulings within a month at best. In our practice, there was a case which the court took nearly a year to prepare. Appealing to the court chairman was of no use in helping resolve this issue while the ruling was only prepared after we addressed the qualified board of judges.

The cutoff date to appeal the ruling of a first instance court is 30 days following the declared moment that the ruling is to be prepared in full. Due to this red tape, in their rulings, judges end up indicating a false date for when the ruling will be prepared but this differs from the date when the analytical portion is in fact issued. It turns out that the cutoff date for submitting an appeal is hopelessly missed by the time that the ruling is obtained. This means that one will have to submit a petition to restore the cutoff date. The court will must likely restore the cutoff date (but there is still, of course, always the risk that it will deny it). The petition will be examined in a separate court hearing. This results in wasted time and excess anxiety about the results, and that’s just for starters.

These are precisely the kind of situations that a brief petition for appeal is filed for. All one has to do in the appeal is indicate the parties to the case, the details of the judge, the case and judge number, as well as voice one’s disagreement regarding the ruling that was issued.

The main purpose of a brief petition for appeal is to get it on record that there was no motivated ruling issued at the moment that it was submitted.

A brief petition for appeal can be mailed in, sent by email, or submitted directly to the court in person. A record of the appeal's submission will be added to the case's file on the court's website.

After the court has written up the motivated ruling, it will issue a decision to leave the appeal without action and indicate the date to correct the violations. Upon receiving the motivated decision, the lawyer can then take to writing up a full petition for appeal with peace of mind.