Time Is Running Out for Procrastinating Lawyers : Superior Court Judges Will Use Computers to Wrest Control of Civil Cases From Attorneys Causing Delays

There’s a revolution afoot at the San Diego County Superior Court.

The judges are seizing control.

To the dismay of procrastinating--not to mention greedy--lawyers, the court has adopted a tough new set of rules designed to drastically slash delays that now leave many litigants waiting three to four years after civil lawsuits are filed to get their disputes resolved.

With the help of computer technology borrowed from the supermarket industry, frequent deadlines aimed at provoking better preparation by lawyers and hawklike vigilance by the judiciary, the court starting Jan. 2 intends to wrap up 90% of civil cases within a year and 98% of lawsuits within 18 months.

If the plan works--and similar, though less comprehensive, programs have worked elsewhere--the San Diego judges and bar leaders expect to save money and anguish for clients, improve the image of the legal system and, ultimately, make attorneys realize the benefits of practicing law under tighter judicial control.

“Few people speak favorably about the litigation process, and their major complaint is that it takes too much time,” said Escondido attorney David Ronquillo, co-chairman of the bench and bar task force that devised the new court rules. “We’re making the whole process a lot more painless and a lot more palatable to the litigants involved, and we’re not conveying such a negative impression about litigation.”

Lawyers who already feel victimized by constant deadlines and demands for responses to their adversaries’ court filings probably will be surprised to learn that judges have not considered themselves in control of the progress of litigation up to now.

But the fact is that historically, the rules governing case management have been the products of lawyers, not judges, according to Ernest Friesen, a professor at California Western School of Law and one of the nation’s leading authorities on court operations.

The results, Friesen said at a seminar Nov. 7 introducing the rules to 550 attorneys and law office employees, were deadlines ample enough to accommodate the bar’s worst-case scenarios, instead of rules that kept routine cases moving apace.

By contrast, the Superior Court’s new rules establish time frames for action geared to the requirements of the everyday lawsuit, as calculated on the basis of extensive research, Friesen said--”not on the anecdotes of lawyers and judges of how long a case might take if it had 42 defendants, it was a class action, and medical malpractice all rolled into one.”

Thus, in the typical case, the rules require the defendant to be served within 60 days. The complaint must be answered within the next 45 days. By 140 days later, the two parties must jointly file a statement outlining the outstanding issues in the case. And then, 60 days later--just 10 months after the case was filed--the court will give the parties a date for trial, if no alternative means of settling the dispute seems viable.

In the past, the Superior Court has imposed virtually no limits on the time that could slip away before the filing of the memo listing the issues in a case. A study by Friesen found that about half the time required to get a case resolved was consumed in that early, unmanaged portion of the litigation.

So while judges could claim to be hustling cases along fairly well once the issues were laid out, clients have remained gravely dissatisfied with the court’s diligence, said Superior Court Judge Michael I. Greer, who helped develop the new guidelines.

“They still feel they’re getting shafted, because there’s a big gap before then,” Greer said.

Under the new rules, missing the deadlines can bring court sanctions down upon a tardy lawyer, ranging from fines to the dismissal of a case or of a defendant’s reply. On the other hand, every deadline has an out for lawyers who need more time.

The point, Friesen explained, is neither to punish lawyers nor to impose impossibly short timetables on litigation. Rather, the system is designed to repeatedly prod attorneys to take hard looks at their cases and weigh earlier the possibility of settling the disputes short of trial.

“Every time the lawyers get prepared again--pull the files out and study it, evaluate it--we (settle) about half the cases that are going through the system,” Friesen said.

“The vast majority of cases settle,” said Superior Court Presiding Judge Donald W. Smith. “They only settle when there’s an event to force the people to look at it and get it settled.”

Those provocative “events” will be docketed by the computer systems that officials term critical to the rules’ success. Judges say they could not ride herd over the 24,000 civil cases filed in the Superior Court each year without the court’s new computers, which employ the black-and-white bar codes and scanning systems used in many supermarkets.

The computers, obtained as part of a pilot data-gathering project of the state Judicial Council, will be programmed to check whether deadlines have been met. If not, the machines will spit out notices to lawyers to appear in court to explain their tardiness.

“In order to take control, you need computer capability to do it,” Smith said. “We just don’t have the bodies to do these things manually.”

At first blush, lots of lawyers hate nearly everything about the court’s new management plan. Ronquillo admits he was not too impressed when he was introduced to the system.

“My concern was that I was going to have a judge looking over my shoulder,” he said. “I was trying to extend the period within which I had primary control, in order to try to resolve the case for my client.”

But Ronquillo said he realized he wanted that control so he could better steer his clients’ cases through the county’s clogged legal system. With the new rules, he said, virtually all cases should move more quickly through the courts, so the individual lawyer’s need for control should decline.

“If you have a father-figure, if you will--a judge saying, ‘Listen guys or girls, let’s move this puppy along’--and if he has the rules to implement it and has the sanctions to cause you not to delay things, then neither side is going to delay it,” Ronquillo explained. “And that’s going to be to the benefit of both of the litigants.”

Friesen told the crowd of lawyers at the seminar at the Convention and Performing Arts Center that he initially expects objections to the new procedures from lawyers inclined to boost their earnings from cases by needlessly dragging them out.

But based on experience in such cities as Phoenix that have implemented similar rules, Friesen promised that even the odd money-grubbing attorney is likely to learn to appreciate the new system.

In Phoenix, he said, court management “made it harder to milk a case. But it made the people who used to milk their cases turn over more cases, so they made more money anyway.”

In fact, Friesen said, many Phoenix lawyers asked to transfer their older cases to the new fast-track system--a phenomenon he predicted would take hold in San Diego as well.

Court officials admit the system could run into problems, however, without additional resources to support it.

The Superior Court will need more computers within a couple of years to keep the system working, according to Executive Officer William Pierce. It will also need the six additional judgeships approved in principle by the Board of Supervisors, but not yet filled for lack of courtroom space and lack of funding to pay for their clerks and bailiffs, Pierce said.

The court, however, cannot even request money for the extra judgeships until next summer, when the county will be crafting its next budget, he noted. By then, if the new management system is working, numerous fresh cases will be rushing toward trial--cases that will plow into the backlog of older cases coming up for trial under the slower, existing rules.

Assuming that hurdle can be overcome, boosters of the new procedures expect the rules will go far to restore the public confidence in courts that has crumbled under the pressure of delay.

“Most people, when they come in, are just overwhelmed by the prospect that litigation could take two to five years,” Ronquillo said. “In their wildest dreams, they wouldn’t have anticipated it could take that long.

“Most of them think it’s going to be over within a few months. Now, it may very well be that their anticipated time period may come to pass.”