Rand Study Identifies Cause of Court Jam : More Complex Cases, Not Volume, Found Reason for Backlog

The popular conception that courts are strangling on backlogged cases simply because people are more suit-happy suffered a setback Tuesday in a Rand Corp. report holding that the per-capita rate of filing civil suits in Los Angeles County Superior Court was actually lower in 1980 than it was 50 years earlier.

Not only that, Rand’s Institute for Civil Justice reported in a review of 100 years of the Los Angeles court’s history, judges’ caseloads were smaller five years ago than in 1930.

Why, then, had the delay in getting cases to trial “increased dramatically” from an average of six months in 1940 to 40.5 months in 1981?

The answer, according to historian Molly Selvin and survey analyst Patricia A. Ebener in their report, “Managing the Unmanageable: A History of Civil Delay in the Los Angeles Superior Court,” was that in earlier years, the court “functioned largely as a debt collection agency,” whereas it now is preoccupied largely with personal injury litigation.

That means, the report writers said, more complex discovery proceedings, filings, motions and, hence, more of the judges’ time.

New Empirical Data

Selvin and Ebener said the Santa Monica-based institute made the study, financed primarily by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation with support by the California Community Foundation, in an effort to determine whether the time-to-trial delay problem has worsened over the years and whether changes can be made.

Frank S. Zobin, executive officer of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, called the report “probably the most complete, long-term analysis of the court’s operation” and said it contains “a good deal of empirical data never gathered before.”

Although former Presiding Judge Harry V. Peetris and his two predecessors had managed to drastically cut the Superior Court’s civil suit backlog from more than 73,000 cases countywide and more than 45,000 in the downtown Central District in 1981 to less than half that in 1982, the figures were on the increase again by the middle of last year. So was the waiting time.

Zobin attributed the increase to the fact that many cases had to go to trial before the lapse of five years from their dates of filing or be dismissed under state law. Disposing of cases by trial, he estimated, takes up to 20 times as long as settling out of court.

Although only 466 civil cases were filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in 1880, compared to 70,000 in 1980, the Rand report writers noted, the per capita rate of people filing civil suits over the last several decades generally has remained at no more than .5%, or one in 200.

Selvin and Ebener noted that the Los Angeles court, “like most courts, has little institutional memory, perhaps due to its size and the regular rotation of its leadership.”

As a result, they said, “the court has introduced some procedures more than once, seemingly without understanding why that innovation wasn’t particularly successful.”

But the report said that Zobin and five judges are working as a committee with the institute to find efficient means of dealing with congestion and delay.