What preservation really requires on appeal
The best appellate argument in the world is worthless if the issue wasn't preserved below. Here's how to check before you write.
Appellate work has a brutal gate before it even reaches the merits: preservation. An error that wasn't raised and ruled on in the trial court is, in most cases, simply not available to you on appeal, no matter how right you are.
Preservation is a record question
Whether an issue was preserved is answered by the record: was it raised, was there a ruling, was it specific enough. That means it's checkable: you can go to the clerk's record and the reporter's record and find the objection, or find that there isn't one.
Check before you invest the argument
The mistake is to draft a beautiful argument and only then discover the issue died in the trial court. The workflow should run the other way: spot the candidate issues, confirm each was preserved in the record, and only then invest in the ones that survive.
Cite the record, not your memory
Every factual assertion in an appellate brief should carry a pinpoint to the CR or RR. A tool that drafts with those citations bound automatically, and flags preservation as it goes, is doing the part of appellate work that's most tedious and most consequential.