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5th Circuit Clerk Lyle Cayce Writes Us About Court's Website

By William Peacock, Esq. on December 01, 2014 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

A few months back, I got a good chuckle out of a strange notice posted on the Fifth Circuit's website about the clerk's office declining to provide change to cash-paying customers. After How Appealing's Howard Bashman poked fun at the new policy, the court's clerk Lyle Cayce explained the intelligent rationale for the change to the change policy.

Still, when I wrote a mixed review of the Fifth Circuit's website, I didn't expect a response from Cayce. And I really didn't expect the court to make changes in response to my criticisms.

But they did both.

Letter From Lyle Cayce

While I was away on leave, I received this email:

Dear Mr. Peacock:

I saw your review of our redesigned website and thank you for taking the time to look at the site and share your observations.

I wanted to let you know we are going to make some changes to address two matters you raised. First, while a link to opinions is on the first page, we will make that link more prominent, as you recommend. Second, we agree with your comment that we should accommodate more mobile devices, and will deliver a useful product as soon as we can. In fact, we wanted to roll out a product that met desktop and mobile device needs, but saw that it was going to take extra time to program for mobile devices, so we decided this upgrade for the desktop was significant enough that we should go ahead and activate the new site, rather than await the development of specifications for mobile devices.

Thanks for the feedback, as it will make our site better. If you have any other suggestions, just let us know.

Respectfully,

Lyle

That's twice in the last few months that Lyle has reached out to the legal community to address our concerns over relatively minor matters. Pretty cool, huh?

Website Already Fixed

My two main complaints about the new site were the buried link to the latest opinions and the not-mobile-friendly design. The latter is a work in progress, according to Mr. Cayce, but the opinion issue has already been fixed:

Well done, Fifth Circuit. You're very quickly becoming my favorite appeals court.

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