Special Meetings Aimed at Resolving Suits : Volunteer Settlement Conferences Help Trim Civil Courts’ Backlog

It would be hard to imagine a lawsuit further from settlement than the one under discussion early this week in the chambers of San Diego Superior Court Judge Gilbert Harelson.

The plaintiffs--the survivors of a young Navy instructor killed two years ago in a motorcycle accident near Sea World--were demanding $250,000.

The defendants--the operators of the business that owned the other vehicle involved in the accident--were offering nothing.

The two sides had different versions of the accident, with witnesses to back up each side. They had differing views of the motorcyclist’s share of the responsibility. And each side’s lawyers believed they could prevail at trial.

“It isn’t often you have an accident as mixed up as this one is,” defense lawyer Doug Butz said.

Nonetheless, the case came before Harelson, who was joined by two experienced personal-injury lawyers this week in an attempt--through an informal, court-sponsored brand of fact-finding--to bring the dispute closer to resolution and help clear the Superior Court’s calendar of a glut of civil litigation.

This week and next, court officials say, about 130 personal injury cases will be submitted to such three-member panels--called settlement conferences--by lawyers seeking to avoid the current wait of 12 to 14 months for bringing a civil case to trial in Superior Court.

Participation in the once-a-year settlement conferences is wholly voluntary. Both parties must agree to participate, but neither is bound by the suggested settlements offered by the panels, which usually listen to about 90 minutes of the plaintiff’s and defense attorneys bashing each others’ arguments and evidence before offering a resolution.

But lawyers say the panel members give them candid, realistic appraisals of the prospects for their cases--assessments that may bring the disputes to speedier resolution, spur a recalcitrant client to face facts or, sometimes, carry a lawsuit directly into the courtroom for the recording of an official settlement.

“You’re talking with a judge and two experienced lawyers, who (together) usually have something like 50 or maybe 75 or 100 years worth of experience, so you listen very carefully to what they have to say,” said lawyer Craig Higgs, who will both sit as a panelist and bring cases before panels during the two weeks.

“In some of these cases, you’ll find it’s the attorneys who need persuading,” said Higgs, a former president of the San Diego County Bar Assn. “And in some of the cases it’s the clients who need the . . . settlement conference to convince them (to settle).”

In 1984, about 60% of the cases brought before the special panels were settled, saving an estimated 144 days of trial time--the equivalent of seven months’ work for a single judge, according to Ronald Overholt, the court administrator who schedules the conferences. The 130 cases scheduled for conferences this month are double the number of last year--and even so, there were more lawyers applying to participate in the program than there were time slots--he said.

“It tends to give a little bit different perspective,” Overholt said. “You have somebody from both sides as well as the neutral judge.”

The voluntary conferences are one of several devices used by the court to trim its civil caseload to more manageable proportions.

For the last two years, Superior Court judges have required the lawyers in every case expected to take more than three hours in trial to attend a court session in which alternatives to a full-blown court hearing are considered, Overholt said.

Some cases are sent by the court to arbitration. Some are referred to a program run by the University of San Diego School of Law for binding hearings before retired judges. Others are scheduled for refereeing or further discussion.

The object, Overholt explained, is to avoid setting trial dates for the 95% of cases that, experience shows, are going to be resolved prior to trial. That way, court calendars can more realistically reflect the cases that will come to trial.

And with fewer cases scheduled for trial, the wait for a trial date can--and has been--be shortened.

“Instead of taking three years to get your case to trial, it’s now taking one,” Overholt said. As of October, the most recent date for which statistics were available, about 2,200 cases were scheduled for trial in the downtown San Diego court. Four years earlier, in October 1981, there were more than 5,500 cases on the court’s trial calendar.

Harelson and his fellow panelists, defense lawyer Jim Jacques and plaintiff’s lawyer Wes Harris, had mixed success Monday.

In the morning, their wise counsel persuaded litigants who were $90,000 apart on a case to compromise and settle. In the afternoon, they got almost nowhere with defense attorney Butz and George McClenahan, lawyer for the motorcyclist’s family.

With Butz outside the judge’s chambers, McClenahan told the panel what he thought of his opponents’ refusal to offer a settlement. “This is insane,” he said. “I can’t believe they’re serious in this.”

While McClenahan waited in the hallway, Butz offered his theory of why the two sides had bothered to attend the settlement conference. McClenahan “wants to come down here so we listen to what you say and maybe our position will change,” Butz told the panelists.

After hearing both sides describe the case and sifting through police reports and stacks of photographs, the panel sent Butz and McClenahan packing.

“You’re too far apart,” Harelson said.

Butz had predicted the result in an interview before the conference, but allowed that the session would be worthwhile anyway.

“The fact we walk out of here without a settlement does not in any way suggest this is a waste of time,” he said. The conferences “provide litigants with insights they had not seen before. Oftentimes a case will settle down the road.”