Bernard v. Hartford Fire Insurance

Opinion

POCHÉ, Acting P. J.

Plaintiffs James J. Bernard and James J. Bernard, Inc., doing business as La Barca Restaurant, appeal from a judgment entered upon the granting of a motion for summary judgment in favor of defendant, Hartford Fire Insurance Company. For reasons set forth in the unpublished portion of the opinion, we affirm the judgment.

We publish the following portion of the opinion to emphasize that, despite certain rule changes designed to make appeals speedier and less costly, certain enduring principles of appellate practice remain unchanged.

I. Appellate Record

The record on this appeal was prepared under California Rules of Court, rule 5.2 which permits parties in courts of appeal to stipulate to the use of

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the original superior court file in lieu of the standard clerk’s transcript created from photocopies of the file documents. Since the purpose of the procedure is to reduce the time and expense of preparing a clerk’s transcript, the parties receive from the superior court only a chronological index indicating the beginning page of each named document. Each party then composes its own working copy of a clerk’s transcript using the copies of the documents it already possesses, arranging them in the order set out in the index.

The rule states that “[t]he clerk shall send copies of the index to counsel ... for use in paginating their files in accordance with the chronological index.” Unless the parties add pagination to their working copies, as the rule clearly intends that they do, their versions of the clerk’s transcript will not be sequentially numbered, although the file of original documents transmitted to this court will be.

It is the duty of a party to support the arguments in its briefs by appropriate reference to the record, which includes providing exact page citations. (Cal. Rules of Court, rule 15(a);

People

v.

Woods

(1968) 260 Cal.App.2d 728, 731 [67 Cal.Rptr. 396].) Briefs which do not meet this requirement may be stricken. (Cal. Rules of Court, rule 18.) As practical matter, the appellate court is unable to adequately evaluate