District Judges May Limit Civil Cases to 4 Days

U.S. District Court judges in Southern California, faced with large numbers of complex, time-consuming cases and feeling the effects of several years of understaffing, are considering imposing a four-day limit on civil trials to ease the backlog.

The judges will take up the proposal, and possibly other relief measures, at a meeting scheduled for next week.

“We’re just swamped,” said Judge Dickran Tevrizian, who is calling for the temporary moratorium. “The situation here has reached crisis proportions.”

Tevrizian said his caseload has tripled since he was appointed to the federal bench in 1985 after more than a decade as a state court judge. “I’ve never worked so hard in all my life,” he said.

The court, which is headquartered in Los Angeles and operates branches in Santa Ana and Riverside, serves more than 17 million people in a seven-county region of Southern California.

Its 24 full-time and 10 semi-retired judges handle about 15,000 civil and criminal cases a year, including some of the thorniest in the nation’s federal court system.

Lawyers and court personnel say the district’s judges have been working nights and weekends, forgoing vacations and, in some cases, imperiling their health, trying to keep pace with their workloads.

Consuelo B. Marshall, the chief judge, said the caseload crunch has taken a “physical and psychological toll” on many jurists. “I think we’ve reached a point where everyone is just exhausted,” she said.

Although three new judges were appointed last year and at least two more are expected to be named this year, the court continues to struggle with the effects of a long drought in the filling of judicial vacancies. During most of the last five years, the court has operated at 20% below its authorized strength.

No other judicial district in the nation has had to get by with as many vacancies for as long as this one, Tevrizian said.

The logjam resulted from feuding between the Republican-controlled Senate and Democratic President Clinton’s administration. The Senate must approve all federal judicial nominations.

The problem was eased somewhat after President Bush took office and agreed to the creation of bipartisan screening committees in California to recommend nominees. But four judicial slots remain unfilled.

Tevrizian said that the appointment of more judges will solve the problem over the long term, but that it will take a few years to digest the cases that have been piling up.

For that reason, he said, he will propose at a Jan. 9 meeting of fellow judges that civil trials be limited to four days until the court’s backlog is substantially reduced. Criminal trials would not be affected.

While empathizing with the judges, Marc A. Becker, president of the Federal Bar Assn. of Los Angeles, said he personally believes it would be a mistake to “arbitrarily close the courthouse doors” to significant and complex civil litigation. Becker said members of the bar need to exercise their political influence in Washington to ensure that the remaining court vacancies are filled as soon as possible.

John B. Quinn, who has litigated many lengthy civil suits in federal court, said he could live with four-day trials if that’s what the judges decided. Lawyers would have to adapt, he said.

Quinn said staggering caseloads have taken a heavy toll on many judges.

“If you want to do a conscientious job, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to deal with all the issues that present themselves,” he said. “So they’re having to work nights, weekends and holidays. It’s a very sad state of affairs. If we don’t do something, we’re going to lose some judges.”

The four-day limit would force litigants in potentially lengthy civil cases to settle, arbitrate or wait until the moratorium was lifted.

The caseload problem is being felt around the country, but federal judges here say the situation is worse than elsewhere because of the extraordinary number of complicated and time-consuming cases -- criminal and civil -- being filed in Southern California.

Corporate accounting scandals have spawned a flood of class-action shareholder lawsuits. The presence of so many high-tech industries in Southern California has given rise to numerous patent infringement cases that often require months to litigate. There has also been a surge in intellectual-property lawsuits, a byproduct of the region’s entertainment industry

“I came from the Superior Court, where the workload was heavy, but the workload in federal court is absolutely overwhelming,” said Judge David O. Carter, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court in 1998. “I can’t remember a week without working on Saturday and Sunday. Vacations have fallen by the wayside. Thank goodness, my children are older and aren’t living at home.

“We’re very fortunate to have these jobs, to be able to serve the public,” Carter said. But, he added, the lingering vacancies coupled with the growing complexity of cases has created a crisis within the court.

Statistics compiled by the U.S. Administrative Office of the Courts in Washington appear to bear him out. They show that each judge in the Central District of California -- which covers Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties -- handled an average “weighted” load of 508 cases during the 2002 fiscal year. That contrasted with 478 cases the year before. Weights are assigned to cases to reflect their complexity and how long it takes to resolve them. When the weighted caseload surpasses 430 per judge, a court is theoretically entitled to more judges, according to Dick Carelli, spokesman for the administrative office. By that standard, the Central District should have at least 31 full-time judges, seven more than it now has.