What You Need to Know about #AppellateTwitter. #AppellateTwitter can be more than a place to 'nerd out' about legal writing or the law

• Author: Scott R. Larson
• Pages: 21-23

Appellate Practice

Summer 2021, Vol. 40No. 3

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21

May 30, 2017

What You Need to Know about

#AppellateTwitter

#AppellateTwitter can be more than a place to “nerd out”

about legal writing or the law.

By Scott R. Larson – May 30, 2017

Increasingly, Twitter has become a means of networking and communicating about the law

for lawyers and judges. Many of these lawyers and judges have formed a community using

the Twitter hashtag #AppellateTwitter. Below are some of the benefits of this community

and why you may want to get involved.

Primer

Before proceeding, a quick primer on Twitter terminology might be helpful. First, a

“handle” is how people find or identify you on Twitter. Your handle begins with the “@”

symbol and is followed by the name or title you’ve chosen for your identifier. A “tweet” is

an individual message of no more than 140 characters, posted by a Twitter user. To

“retweet” means to forward or repost someone else’s tweet. And a “hashtag” is a subject-

matter identifier that is included in a tweet. Every hashtag is comprised of two parts: the

hash (#) followed by a word or phrase (the tag). If the tag is a phrase, then the words are

not separated—hence, #AppellateTwitter.

Hashtags function as user-generated card catalogs. Users can enter a hashtag into Twitter’s

search bar, and Twitter will produce a list of all the tweets using that hashtag. If a user

wants to participate in a conversation about a topic, the user can include the appropriate

hashtag in a tweet, and the tweet will appear to anyone searching for that hashtag.

Entrepreneurial Twitter users craft new hashtags of their own devising. The

#AppellateTwitter hashtag was created in the summer of 2016by Raffi Melkonian

(@RMFifthCircuit), an appellate lawyer in Houston, in reference to a group of appellate

lawyers who had met each other through Twitter and were meeting in person for the first

time. Since then, #AppellateTwitter has become a network of hundreds of lawyers and

judges nationwide. They even have their own coffeemug.

“Nerding Out” in a Digital Law-Review Office

#AppellateTwitter has become an increasinglypopular (and sometimes authoritative—

see hereat footnote 26) hashtag for appellate lawyers to discuss everything from Supreme

Court nominations to the proper location of a signature block in a brief.