A lot of things in the practice of law are fixable. Miss responding to requests for production or interrogatories by a couple of days? Not good, but in the end, probably no big deal. But miss filing a notice of appeal? Big deal.
In Atamian v. University of Texas (available here), the plaintiff’s motion for new trial was denied on May 10, 2018, and the plaintiff failed to timely file a notice of appeal. The plaintiff filed a “Motion for Leave to File Notice of Appeal” that asserted “excusable neglect” for the plaintiff’s failure to timely file the notice of appeal. The plaintiff “asserted that, although notice of the new trial motion’s denial was properly sent to the email provided to the district court and received by his lawyer’s firm, when it was internally forwarded to the lawyer himself, it landed in ‘junk mail,’ and was therefore overlooked.” The district court denied the motion, refusing to find excusable neglect, and the plaintiff appealed that decision. The Fifth Circuit concluded that the plaintiff failed to show reversible error (on the denial of the motion for leave to file a late appeal), affirmed the district court’s order, and dismissed the remainder of appeal for want of jurisdiction.