The task of presentation.

• Jurisdiction: United States

Section 135. The task of presentation.—The basic responsibility of the advocate, after all, is the task of presentation—to present the law and facts of his particular case so that the court will know what the controversy is about, and will want to decide it in his favor.

That task is conditioned by three factors: the length of the record—the facts; the complexity of the questions involved—the law; and the interval allowed for argument—the time.

Each of these three factors varies from case to case. The record may consist of not over ten printed pages, as for example when the appeal involves review of the dismissal of a complaint or of an indictment. The record may run to several hundred or a thousand or even several thousand pages, when the case represents an appeal in a long criminal trial, or in a rate-fixing proceeding, or in the usual antitrust case. Indeed, on occasion, the advocate must deal with what are literally monster records; recent examples are the 15,937 printed pages in the Communist conspiracy case,¹ 12,719 printed pages in the North-South rate case,² 16,532 printed pages in the Hartford-Empire antitrust case,³ and 16,832 printed pages in the Cement Institute basing-point case.⁴ (Curiously enough, the record in the DuPont-General Motors antitrust case⁵ was a modest one by those standards; it had been so thoroughly compressed by counsel that it extended to only 7510 pages.)

The law factor is similarly a...