Officials Act to Trim Backlog of Superior Court Cases

In an ambitious bid to untangle the backlog of civil cases clogging the downtown County Courthouse, officials have announced a new program aimed at cutting the time it takes a lawsuit to come to trial from as long as five years to as little as one.

Court officials will launch the three-year experimental program next January to comply with a 1986 law passed by the California Legislature. The program gives judges broad new powers to make certain that cases are tried with a minimum of delays.

If it works, court officials say that by 1991, 90% of the civil litigation that is filed should be completed in one year, 98% in 18 months and virtually all cases within two years.

The only types of litigation that will be exempted under the new rules are juvenile, probate or family-law cases, which already come to trial much more quickly than other types of litigation.

The key to the project lies in how cases will be assigned to judges. Lawsuits now are not immediately assigned to judges when they are filed, and lawsuits ready for trial must work their way up a lengthy list to reach the next available open courtroom and available judge. Typically, it now takes three years at the least before a case gets that far.

Most times, how long it takes to even make the bottom of the list is up to the lawyers handling the cases. Under current procedures, the attorneys decide when to initiate the steps that typically precede an actual trial, everything from pretrial motions to exchanging information with the opposing side.

But under the new program, 25 judges, nearly half of those on the roster of downtown Los Angeles Superior Court, will assume much of that role. But it is uncertain how many of the 108,000 cases filed downtown each year will be diverted into the new program.

The 25 judges will be assigned cases at the time they are filed to oversee them through the pretrial machinations and on through the trial itself. Moreover, the judges will take control of some cases that already have been filed but are not yet ready for trial.

In other words, judges will “assume and maintain control over the pace of litigation,” said Assistant Presiding Judge Richard P. Byrne, who is heading the project. The judges will work off a series of strict deadlines, established by the new state law, dubbed the Trial Court Delay Reduction Act of 1986.

Under the law, attorneys will be given only a certain number of days for a variety of procedural steps. And, if the deadlines are not met, the penalties can be stiff--ranging from limitations placed on witnesses or evidence to fines, or even outright dismissals of the cases.

In addition to Los Angeles, the program also will be inaugurated in eight other Superior Courts in California.