Oklahoma Appeals - The Podcast
Oklahoma Appeals - The Podcast
Episode 049: A Legal Legacy and the Inner Workings of the Oklahoma Supreme Court: A Conversation with Chief Justice John Kane IV
We sit down with none other than Chief Justice John Kane IV of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, in what marks his debut on the podcast frontier. Embark on a journey through the corridors of justice with a man whose career is not just a profession but a family legacy. Chief Justice Kane opens the doors to his storied ascent from the private law firm trenches of Pawhuska to the pinnacle of judicial responsibility, all the while humbly reflecting on the profound honor and unexpected turns that have shaped his path.
As the gavel falls on this episode, we celebrate the strides made in the Oklahoma judicial system, from the much-anticipated e-filing system that is revolutionizing court proceedings to the unique autonomy of each justice’s chambers—akin to a constellation of private law firms. You’ll gain an appreciation for the weekly rhythm that governs the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court. We also delve into the art of impactful oral advocacy and the crafting of compelling briefs. We even take a moment to muse on what life might have held for Chief Justice Kane if the family tradition of law and ranching hadn't called.
Welcome listeners to episode 49 of Oklahoma Appeals, the podcast, our first recording of 2024, and we are starting off with a bang. A very special guest I know we tease a big guest upcoming in the last couple of episodes and we're delivering today. So today we have joining us on the pod the Chief Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, mr John Kane IV. Welcome to the show, thank you.
Speaker 2:Glad to be here.
Speaker 1:Now have you done a podcast as the Chief Justice prior to this episode? You are my first podcast. Well, it's quite possible, then, that this is the first podcast appearance for any Chief Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court. I don't know of any others. You're groundbreaking.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I'll make sure I include that in my memoir.
Speaker 1:Okay, so just a brief bio, but we certainly want to hear the story from the man himself. But just a brief bio. Chief Justice Kane hails from Paw Huska. He's a Paw Huska Husky graduate of Paw Huska High School and Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma College of Law. He practiced in private practice in Paw Huska before taking the bench in Osage County and then was appointed to our Oklahoma Supreme Court by Governor Stitt In 2019, he has served as the Vice Chief Justice and, as of, I guess, recently became the Chief Justice since January 1st 2023. So you're into the job. So you've got it all under control by now.
Speaker 2:It's all tied up now, that's right.
Speaker 1:Well, could you tell our listeners a little bit about your path in the law and your path to becoming the Chief Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court?
Speaker 2:Yeah, happy to when I passed the bar exam in 1987, I joined my family law firm there in Paw Huska. We went from Kane and Kane to Kane Kane Kane. I practiced law with Matthew John Kane the second and Matthew John Kane the third. So my friends call me John because we had so many Matthews running around when I was growing up that it was just way too confusing. My grandfather's father, the first, matthew John Kane, was actually a member of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, helped draft our Constitution and then was popularly elected and joined the first Oklahoma Supreme Court. He was actually Chief Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court three times, from his tenure in 1907 until his passing 100 years ago. He passed away in 1924.
Speaker 2:So we've got a long history in law in our family and growing up as a kid I just always thought that being on the Oklahoma Supreme Court would just be about the greatest thing that a person could do, and I'm still shocked that I'm here. Honestly, I've been shocked at every step of the way, though. I mean I've been very blessed that every job that I've ever had felt like what Mike Gundy would say is your New York Yankees job. I was so thrilled and honored to be a lawyer, which is the longest tenure of anything I've done in my career is practice law. So thrilled to be on the trial bench and now thrilled to be on Supreme Court and honored to be the Chief Justice.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you very much for that background and I should probably add not that anyone would think otherwise, but Jaina being a regular practitioner before the court we want everyone to certainly know that we have not discussed any active or past cases with Chief Justice Kane before we started recording and we don't plan to why we're recording. So if that's what you tuned in to listen to and find out some, you know, some gouged on some pending cases and you're going to be disappointed on that front, but I'm sure not overall.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Yeah, I don't want anybody to mistake this as anything but an interview of your Chief Justice to see what we do and what's going on. Yeah, we're not going to discuss the business of the court or the cases that constitute the business of the court on or off the air, because obviously everybody needs to have all their cases determined based upon what's been filed in the case and presented in open court, and you all are getting the floor to know that. But I appreciate you reassuring the public that you know that and that I do too.
Speaker 1:So everyone should know that starting a podcast will not get you any favors at the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
Speaker 3:No, justice Kane, we certainly appreciate you coming on. We've been communicating with your staff about this since, really since you became Chief Justice. This has been on the radar to see if you'd be interested in coming on and visiting with us about the court and about what it's like to be a justice on the Oklahoma Supreme Court. And it certainly is significant, I think, historically that you're the second Chief Justice in your family of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, in fact a hundred years ago, so that, I think, is something that's really interesting, will be really interesting to our listeners. If you can, maybe something that the general public doesn't know and I think maybe some lawyers don't really even understand about the court is can you tell us a little bit more just about how the court selects the Chief Justice?
Speaker 2:Yeah, somewhere in Article 7 of the Constitution it provides that the members of the court will select from amongst them a Chief Justice and a Vice Chief Justice. I think it was about almost 20 years ago that there was some litigation on that in federal court and some of our internal rules were discussed at length in that case. But you know, basically the Constitution tells the tale that the court will have for their chief who the court wants as their chief. So it's quite a privilege and an honor to me that they voted their confidence in me to be their chief and I'm thrilled to have Vice Chief Justice Rowe as our Vice Chief.
Speaker 3:And so it's a two year term as Chief Justice, if I remember correctly. Can you tell our listeners what additional duties, if any, that you may have as the Chief Justice, as opposed to if you were a justice without that particular title?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's quite a bit actually and you know, I was a trial judge in Osage County for about 15 years before I joined the Pellet Bench and it feels a lot more like the trial bench than being a regular justice feels, because when you are in the Chief Justice's office just like you know trial judge's office the door to your office is basically a revolving door and all day long you have people showing up saying Chief, I need just a minute of your time and those minutes pretty quickly and you look up and your day's gone. I'm the face of the court for many things. I'm the default person to administer a lot of oaths. I had the honor to swear in the governor and the lieutenant governor, the attorney general and all the state officers a year ago. That was exciting.
Speaker 2:Of course, I chair all the meetings at the Supreme Court and all the sessions of court. I manage the schedule of the court. I oversee the operations of the marshal and the four referees. Any state of the judiciary that addresses it needs to be given. I do that. I handle certain judicial discipline matters. I represent the judiciary in front of the legislature, including budgeting matters. I make appointments to boards and commissions and, of course, in addition to my other duties that all the justices have. So I still, of course, in writing opinions, reading other justices' opinions and voting on those. So it's a very full and rewarding life.
Speaker 3:If you don't mind, can you share with us any goals that you had coming into your tenure as the Chief Justice?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the number one goal that I had, honestly, was just to retain the respect and friendship with my colleagues, because I don't care how good a Chief Justice you are and I don't care how good a friend you are with your justices, there's going to be some time over your two-year tenure where every one of your colleagues is going to be furious with you. It's just, it's unavoidable and you just have to accept that reality, that you've got to do the right thing and if that is unpopular, then you need to figure out how to mend that fence and move on. As far as specific things that I wanted, I had a very specific goal of pushing over the top our efforts to get e-filing. We had oh gosh, it was probably 10 years ago that I was on the committee that was working on that and we were tantalizingly close to a solution, and then that went south for a number of reasons and we started over and we are now at a point with the 50% of our caseload that uses the OCIS filing system being able to offer an e-filing product. And now it's in beta testing.
Speaker 2:Oklahoma, cleveland and Logan counties are beginning beta testing this month and the early feedback is good. I'm hearing a lot of good things about it, so I'm very excited about getting that done, and that was a specific goal that I had, and I was also interested in seeing that we were a little more global in our outreach with our sister courts. I felt like there was a lot of knowledge in other states that we could benefit from, and we'd had some budget crisis in years past that limited our ability to travel and interact with our colleagues in other states, and I would very much like to reverse that trend. I was able to get to Nashville last May and go to the National Board of Bar Examiners and meet with other justices to discuss pertinent issues regarding that and other things, and I hope to do more of that this year. So those are a couple of things I had in mind.
Speaker 3:Okay, I know you have burning questions about the e-filing goal and the e-filing system, so I'll cede here to you.
Speaker 1:No, I don't think I have any burning questions. I have a hearty congratulations on the progress. Already Jana and I talked in a previous episode of the podcast about a CLE that I went to in Oklahoma County that Frank holds, claw from the administrative office of the courts put on about the e-filing project and showed us some things about the system, so I was very encouraged to see it actually happening. As you mentioned, there have been rumors of it for quite some time but we're excited to see it get adopted and I assume the plan is for it to expand statewide and I know Jana is anxiously awaiting the rollout in the appellate system so she can cut down on the number of copies that we have to make for to make records and driving around the state to gather those up.
Speaker 2:Yes, I remember as a practitioner the binding machine and the stacks and yes, I've been there, done that and got the t-shirt.
Speaker 1:Well, you talked already about the additional duties of the Chief Justice, but could you give our listeners some insight on just what the average week to the extent there is such a thing looks like for a justice on the court, as far as the kind of the battle rhythm of how the court works on a weekend and week out basis?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is kind of interesting and I don't know how much of this is driven by architecture and how much of this is just driven by the nature of the work. But the way the Supreme Court building is set up what you end up having you have nine different chambers, so each justice kind of works like their own law firm, basically because you've got your own self-contained unit, you've got your admin, you've got your staff, attorneys and you are working together, and so every justice structures are weak in a way that makes them the most effective. We have conference Monday mornings and obviously that's a very big day for everybody. You know the way we're set up, recently having extra sessions amongst ourselves on other days of the week. But I'm reexamining that and we may in fact revive that practice from times past because I think I just see the benefit in it because easily the justices the other four days of the week they're getting ready for the next Monday and you know we on a typical week we may have probably 35 to 40 cases that we are looking at.
Speaker 2:That's one thing that really surprised me when I joined the court and it shouldn't have. I mean, if you're really stopping thinking through when you get an order sheet out that says cert denied. You know that just looks like well, okay, they didn't think that that case fit their criteria. But you know there's a lot more than just that order sheet that goes into every justice's decision. You know, because you've got to look at a whole raft of things very carefully before you're ready to intelligently vote on whether or not that order sheet denying cert goes out. So yeah, there's a lot more reading. That the volume of reading and things that you have to be conversant on is a little surprising to those that haven't really thought it through or have never worked up here. So my answer would be every justice solves that in the way that suits their chambers the best.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, of course, some of the things that you are reading are things that practitioners are writing. In fact, most of those things that you're reading on a weekly basis, whether it's the start docket or whether it's in a case that's been assigned the briefing there. So can you give our practitioners who are listening any brief writing tips, things that you personally like to see in briefs, or just generally?
Speaker 2:Well, I don't have anything personal to me that I think makes a brief a winner or that is a bad idea in a brief. To me, a good argument is a good argument. The practitioners that are appearing before the Supreme Court are usually pretty astute. So now my staff attorney, Bevan Stockdell, wrote an article last year about a year ago that gave some tips on that, so I guess I'd recommend people to that. It was in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, which is probably archived online, and Bevan was a staff attorney for the Court of Civil Appeals for, I think about eight years before she came here to the Supreme Court, so I thought she had some good insight. As far as me personally, I know when I was a practitioner I didn't have a silver bullet. I didn't have a secret sauce for any of my writing. I just did the best for every client I had. Yeah, I wish there was a silver bullet that I could give you guys. I don't know, it's what you mentioned.
Speaker 3:The silver bullet is when your legal argument is right, you know. That always helps, that helps.
Speaker 1:Well switching gears a bit from written advocacy to oral advocacy. We've certainly noticed here at the pod that the court has been scheduling more oral arguments recently. So just kind of wondering what you think is behind this trend and do you find oral argument helpful. We've heard varying opinions about that from different appellate judges. And also, what do you like to see or not see from an advocate in an oral argument setting?
Speaker 2:Well, I personally find oral argument to be helpful more often than it's not.
Speaker 2:That was one of the things that really struck me when I took the trial bench in 2005 was how often I thought, after reading the briefs, that I had a pretty good idea for what the answer should be, and then I would hear the argument of council and I might learn something new, or my trigger, a line of thought that I had overlooked, and really did I walk away from oral argument on the trial bench feeling like I wasted my time.
Speaker 2:So, you know, every case is evaluated on its own merits and not Every request for argument is one of the courts can grant, but I'm open to the idea of oral argument. In fact, I got curious to see what trends we had in the court, so I went back to see how much oral argument we've been having since the pandemic, and we only had one in 2020, which was in January, before the world ended, and then no more for the rest of 2020. None in 21. We had two in 22. And then we had five last year. And yeah, I mean I'm as investment advisors might say, past results are no indicator of future performance, but yeah, I think the trend is up.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, I don't know if you listen to the podcast or not, but we've discussed oral argument a number of times and of course I was, you know, at the court for several years and so I am a fan of oral argument. I think it's not in addition to the reasons that you mentioned that a lot of times there are lines of questioning that come out that maybe look a little different or feel a little different when you're actually having to discuss those, and they do on paper. I think all those reasons are really important. That goes to the merits of the case, but I also think it's good for the court, for the public and for the lawyers in our state to see the court in action, to learn about each of our individual justices and to hear the types of questions that you all are asking and what it is that has piqued your interest about a certain legal issue that might be at the forefront in a case and that kind of helps on our end, on the practitioners end, and that helps us advise our clients and maybe gives us some insight into what direction the law may be trending, or at least what you all are curious about and what the problems may be and how the law is being applied now. So we are hopeful, certainly, that the trend continues. I know that there's no guarantee, but we certainly appreciate that the court is taking some more cases to allow practitioners to have the opportunity to come and have a conversation with you all.
Speaker 3:We'll go a little bit more lighthearted here with the next few questions. You've been very gracious with your time and humored us to come on our little show. So how about this one? If you weren't a judge or a lawyer, what would you be?
Speaker 2:You know, that's a really good question because, as you can discern, you would certainly suspect from my bio that I haven't had a lot of originality in my vocation, and it actually gets worse. My father was a really good lawyer, but ranching was his real love. He was a rancher that practiced law and I was a lawyer that did a little ranching on the side, and so my undergrad degree was actually in agriculture, economics, with a double degree in accounting. Having said all that, if I had not followed my life in the law, I probably would be no longer a lawyer. I probably would be neither a rancher nor an accountant if I was following my heart, maybe because of my experience on the ranch. That was always fascinating to me was the weather, probably a meteorologist.
Speaker 3:They might can use you this weekend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're going to have some weather coming in. As we're taping, there's some weather coming in and if not, maybe a photographer. I think Gabe noticed my buffalo on my icon for the zoom meeting and I captured that fellow about six miles north of my house outside of Bajaskin. I do love photography. I wouldn't be good enough to be a musician, but I would be happy to manage my son, philip, who's a pretty good musician.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, maybe you haven't had a lot of time for TVs and movies and pleasure reading since you've been the chief, but do you have any book, movie or TV show recommendations for our listeners?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've had the pleasure, gosh, I've lost track. Now it's been it's either two or three times. Last year Justice Cogger had me host her movie night here at the Judicial Center. You know we've got an auditorium here at the Judicial Center that seats about 200 people and Justice Cogger will select a movie that involves some issue involving the law and then puts together a panel of people after the movie to discuss issues that practitioners might have found interesting in the movie. And it's very popular. So you have to. You have to register early when you see these notices go up on the website. But I was really pleased that one of my very favorite lawyer movies of all time was on last year that I got to be the moderator for the panel, my cousin Vinny. I love that movie from a lawyer standpoint because it was not perfectly accurate but they got enough right that if you've practiced law you would nod your head and say, yeah, that's pretty good, that's pretty good.
Speaker 3:Justice Cain, do you know if Justice Cogger is planning to have some more of those this year?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, she's committed to that. Okay, great, I would say what yeah?
Speaker 3:we'll keep an eye on OFCN and when we see him we'll try to get the word out.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I don't know if either one of you have seen my cousin Vinny, but the judge is played by Fred Gwynne, who was Herman Munster on the old Munster TV comedy and it's some sleepy little town in the deep south and it would have been very easy to play to a stereotype and write him as some aced and they wrote him as a very smart guy that ran a good courtroom. So I, the former trial judge, I've watched that and say good job. Screenplay writer.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, we certainly appreciate you taking some of your Friday afternoon to spend talking to us on the pod, and I know our listeners will certainly enjoy the episode and getting to know a little bit more about how the court works and about the Chief Justice. So thanks again, and I hope you have a great weekend and stay warm.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, it was a pleasure to share what little I know with you guys, and I hope it becomes a tradition.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, like I said at the start, as far as I know you're the very first. You probably are the first great grandson grandfather Chief Justice combo on the court, Maybe anywhere, I don't know, but certainly the first Oklahoma Chief Justice to appear on a podcast so far as we know. So we'll be looking for that, as you mentioned in your memoirs.
Speaker 2:Well, when I was sworn in as Chief, I said that I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to think that I could work hard enough to become the greatest Chief Justice Oklahoma's ever had. I'm not even the best Chief Justice in my family, but I'm honored to be here.
Speaker 1:All right, thank you very much. Thanks for listening, jana, and I hope that you enjoyed this episode of Oklahoma Appeals, the podcast. If you like what we're doing with the show, you can support our work by checking out our sponsor, oklahomaformscom. Oklahomaforms is an AI-enabled drafting platform that helps Oklahoma lawyers draft better documents faster. There are automated forms to help lawyers in many practice areas, from estate planning to real estate, so check it out. At OklahomaFormscom. You can find all of our past episodes, whether that be episodes discussing recent Oklahoma Supreme Court opinions or interviews of a number of fascinating guests, ranging from the Oklahoma Solicitor General to a referee from the Oklahoma Supreme Court, to many judges from the trial and appellate bench. Find it all on our website, oklahomaapulescom. Until next time, bye-bye.