Book Review
| Publication year | 2020 |
| Pages | 0144 |
Gregory C. Cook
Justice Champ Lyons was the original reporter on the Alabama Rules of civil Procedure in the early 1970s. For several decades, his treatise Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure Annotated (some called it the Rules Annotated) was a mainstay in any litigator's library.
Lyons's Rules Annotated had those two essentials of a good legal treatise: timeliness and scholarship. Why is timeliness so essential? Every rule has its season. They change over time, as the ways of commerce and conflict are altered by the ways people transact their affairs. And so any legal treatise, but especially one concerning procedural rules, must remain timely to remain relevant. And why scholarship? Well, it's almost self-answering. Any authoritative treatise derives its authority from the author's research, insight, and experience, not to mention clarity of prose.
Timeliness and scholarship synergize in Greg Cook's expansive and extensive rewrite of the Rules Annotated. Cook is a career litigator at Balch & Bingham LLP in Birmingham, an almost three-decade veteran in the world of complex litigation and class-action litigation. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Duke and a 1991 graduate of Harvard Law School, he is a member of the Alabama Supreme Court's Standing Committee on the Rules of Civil Procedure. (On a personal note, Greg is my friend of almost 30 years, a true thinker of truer character.)
In Cook's new Rules Annotated, timeliness and scholarship are in the klieg lights.
As for timeliness, the Rules Annotated was certainly in need of a revision. The Rules Annotated's last overhaul was in 2004, which was before the substantial changes to Rule 4 (concerning service of process), in the somewhat earlier years of arbitration enforcement, just a few years after the 1999 class-action statute became effective, before substantial development in Alabama venue law, and likely before anyone had ever conjured the term electronically stored information (ESI).
Cook's revision of the Rules Annotated brings the treatise in line with current practice and current case law. It also addresses procedural devices not specifically falling under a rule, but closely enough aligned to a rule and commonly encountered in practice to warrant...
To continue reading
Request your trial