Second-year law student Kyle Steven Fry has been named the winner of the 2009 Best Brief Award presented by the University of Wisconsin Law School’s Legal Research and Writing program after a selection process that included review of the submitted briefs by leading Wisconsin practitioners and UW law professors.
Fry's work, on the topic of negligent infliction of emotional distress, was selected as the best of 20 submitted briefs. Mullen Dowdal, who was Fry’s legal writing teacher in spring 2009 when he wrote the brief, characterized Fry’s brief as “tremendous.”
The Legal Writing faculty also congratulated the competition’s four other finalists: Lawrence Fogel, Erin Keesecker, Lincoln Loehrke, and Thomas Rybarczyk, all second-year students.
The process leading to Fry's selection included three separate evaluation stages. First, the teacher from each Legal Research and Writing section selected the best brief written in that section of approximately 13 students. These briefs, without the names of their authors, were then ranked by a panel of three prominent Wisconsin attorneys: Erik R. Guenther of Hurley, Burish & Stanton, S.C.; William E. Parsons of Hawks Quindel Ehlke & Perry, S.C.; and Elizabeth Yockey, Staff Attorney at the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.
The five briefs receiving the highest overall rankings from the practitioners were then reviewed independently, again without names of their authors, by three UW law professors: Linda Greene, Judith Olingy, and Brad Snyder. This is the first year in the six years of the competition that the winning brief was chosen unanimously by the selection committee as the most outstanding one.
Fry was presented with a plaque commemorating his achievement by Law School Dean Kenneth B. Davis, Jr., on November 24, 2009.
Fry, whose hometown is Omaha, Nebraska, earned his B.A. degree at Indiana University in Bloomington with a triple major in Chinese, Philosophy, and Arabic. He has worked as an English teacher in Shanghai and interned as a translator in the anthropology department of the Field Museum in Chicago.
For information on previous winners of the Best Brief Competition, see http://law.wisc.edu/lrw/bestbrief.html .
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