Rule 23(f) permits a petition for permission to appeal a class certification order within fourteen days. The deadline is jurisdictional in practical effect, and there are no extensions.
Fourteen days is not enough time to read a certification record, form a theory, and write a persuasive petition. So the work has to start earlier.
Drafting before the order
We are typically retained while certification is being briefed, not after it is decided. At that point the record is complete and the arguments are known. What is unknown is which way the court will go and on what reasoning.
That is a smaller gap than it sounds. You can draft the predominance section of a petition before you know the outcome, because the record does not change.
What gets granted
Circuits grant these petitions sparingly. The ones that succeed tend to share a feature: they present a question the circuit has not resolved and that recurs, rather than an argument that this particular judge got this particular record wrong.
A petition that reads as error correction is a petition that gets denied. The court is being asked to take an interlocutory appeal; it needs a reason beyond your client’s exposure.
The unglamorous part
Most of the fourteen days goes to compression. The first draft is always too long, and the version that gets granted is usually the fourth.