If you need to hire an attorney to handle a criminal appeal, you should gather some information regarding the attorney's:  1) prior appellate practice experience; 2) Areas of substantive expertise; 3) Academic background; and 4) Prior judicial clerkship experience.  The relevance of prior experience should be obvious, and it also makes sense to retain an appellate lawyer who has knowledge in the same area of law that the appeal involves.

With respect to the third factor, I do not believe that a person's grades in college and law school are necessarily great indicators of what kind of lawyer they'll make.  Nonetheless, there is in my opinion a correlation between doing exceptionally well in school and being a good appellate lawyer.  Perhaps this is because appellate law is the area of practice that is most like law school.  Similarly, people who have served clerkships in Federal or State appellate courts tend, I believe, to be better appellate lawyers.  This may be true in part because law clerks draft judicial opinions for their judges and thus have a unique opportunity to see the appellate process from the judge's point of view. 

In any event, here are my answers to the above questions.  First, I have handled more than 25 criminal appeals, many on a "cold" record (meaning that I did not handle the trial and was retained only for the appeal).  I have presented oral argument more than a dozen times, including before the Eighth and Tenth Circuit U.S. Courts of Appeals, the Kansas Court of Appeals, and the Kansas Supreme Court. 

Second, as you already know, my substantive expertise is in criminal law.

Third, with respect to academics, I received a B.S. in Chemistry with Honors from the University of Kansas and went on to receive my J.D. with High Honors from Duke University, a national top-10 law school.  At Duke, I was selected to membership in The Order of the Coif (a national honor society whose membership is selected only from the top 10% of member schools' graduating students), and received the American Jurisprudence Award for being the year's top student in both Federal Courts and Federal Criminal Law.  I also was elected to serve on the prestigious Duke Law Journal, and served as an Articles Editor during my final year of law school.

Finally, I served a judicial clerkship after graduating law school with Judge James K. Logan on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado.  That Court hears all appeals in Federal cases originating out of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico.

I would note that the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has begun making both appellate briefs and live recordings of oral arguments available on its web site.  This is a great tool for you, the consumer.  If you are debating whether to hire me or someone else to handle a Federal appeal, just go to the Eighth Circuit web site, type in my name, and you can see some of my work product and hear some of my actual arguments.  Do the same for anyone else you're considering hiring.