The Appellate Body has announced a change related to how it approaches summaries of parties' arguments in its reports:
The Appellate Body intends to continue the practice of asking participants in appeals to submit executive summaries of their written submissions. The deadlines for filing such summaries will also remain unchanged, namely, the same deadline as for the written submissions themselves. Nevertheless, the Appellate Body is introducing two new aspects to this practice. First, the Appellate Body will request not only the participants but also each third participant that elects to file a written submission in an appeal to submit an executive summary of such written submission at the same time. Second, rather than using the executive summaries to assist in drafting its own description of the arguments of the participants, the Appellate Body will instead annex to each of its reports the executive summaries submitted by the participants and third participants in the relevant appellate proceedings. A similar practice has been followed with success by WTO dispute settlement panels for some time. This change will enable Members to ensure that their own positions and requests to the Appellate Body are accurately reflected, in their own words, in Appellate Body reports. It will also enable the Appellate Body to make optimal use of its limited resources, and to re-direct resources formerly used to summarize the arguments of the participants and third participants to other areas of appeal work.
The Appellate Body intends to implement this approach on a trial basis, as from the next appeal. At present, two panel reports have been circulated and may be subject to appeal. The parties in these two disputes (Peru – Agricultural Products (WT/DS457) and China – HP-SSST (Japan) / China – HP-SSST (EU) (WT/DS454 / WT/DS460)) have been informed of how the Appellate Body intends to treat their executive summaries in the event of an appeal. ...
(emphasis added) So, instead of the Appellate Body offering its own summaries of the parties' arguments at the front of the report, it will just attach the parties' summaries to the back.
In terms of efficiency, this makes a lot of sense. My one minor concern is that the parties will only offer sanitized versions of the arguments, while the Appellate Body, now and then, includes an important insight or two as part of its own summaries (for example, something said during the oral hearing).
Of course, none of this is a substitute for the full written submissions, which some governments post on their web sites. Of particular interest to me, at the panel stage, have always been the answers to the panel questions, which USTR usually posts (I'm not sure anyone else does this).