Cutback in Hours for Court Clerks Has Lawyers Upset
Citing budget woes, the U.S. District Court clerk’s office in San Diego has slashed the time it is open for public business to five hours a day.
The clerks are open for business only from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, giving the San Diego court the shortest window hours of any of California’s four federal district courts. Court officials say the schedule, in place now for about a month, is likely to stay that way until January, despite considerable grumbling in the San Diego legal community.
The new rule has drawn particular ire from lawyers because the office hours already had been cut once before this year, to a schedule of 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Before that, the hours were 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
‘Not Happy With the Rule’
“The vast majority of practitioners are not happy with the new rule,” said Patrick J. Sullivan, the chairman of the San Diego County Bar Assn.’s federal court committee.
“I find it interesting,” Sullivan said, “that as the banks have gone from bankers’ hours of 10 to 3 to much broader hours, to service their public, the federal court clerk’s office decides to go the other way. What message can be read from that?”
The messenger services who often file lawyers’ briefs with the court are perhaps even more upset than the attorneys, mostly because the business frequently involves rush jobs, said Deborah Schuff, owner of June’s Attorney Service.
“We’ve had to put on extra people and cut back our routes to make sure we’re down there in time,” Schuff said.
“The traffic’s not getting any easier and the parking is a pain,” she said.
In announcing the new hours Aug. 7, the court said that legal papers delivered weekdays between 3 and 6 p.m. could be put in a box outside the courthouse in downtown San Diego, and promised that those papers would be processed the next day but would be stamped with the date of delivery.
That option has offered little assurance to lawyers who want to make absolutely, positively certain that papers get filed before some deadline--for instance, a statute of limitations--expires, Sullivan said.
“Therein lies the rub,” he said. “You have to operate under the assumption that the nameless, faceless clerk’s office is going to handle your product.”
Judge Gordon Thompson Jr., the district’s chief judge, said he and William W. Luddy, the court clerk, are “not unaware of the problem.”
But, Thompson said, “the flow is deluging us. So we’re in a position where we have to slow the flow.”
Statistics, however, indicate that the problem is not so much with the flow of paper as with the flow of money from Washington that pays for the clerks. Though the level of new filings has remained constant, the number of clerks processing them has not.
As of Wednesday, the court had recorded 1,405 civil and 942 criminal filings since Jan. 1, Luddy said, “about what they were running last year.” Through all of 1988, he said, the court accepted 2,013 civil and 1,086 criminal cases.
As for the clerks, there simply hasn’t been enough money for the federal courts since the Gramm-Rudman act limiting federal spending was enacted a few years ago, Luddy said. Whatever money is available is translated by the Administrative Office of the Courts, the Washington bureau that administers federal courts nationwide, into a complex personnel allotment formula, he said.
Luddy said he did not have available specific budget numbers for the San Diego court. But under the formula, his court, which has a full allotment of 51 clerks but had been instructed earlier in the year to run short of that number, was cut further this summer, to 45, Luddy said, adding, “We just could not handle the paper work.”
Though the court had tried to cope a couple months ago with earlier cuts by going to the 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule, it had to cut back further, to the 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. plan, Luddy said.
Two of California’s three other district courts also instituted cutbacks this summer, also blaming the budget crunch. But none have hours as short as San Diego’s.
As of July 31, the Los Angeles federal court changed its public hours to 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., instead of 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., a clerk said. The court in Sacramento also cut back an hour, going July 1 to a 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule instead of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., a clerk said.
Only the San Francisco court is still open its original hours, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., a clerk said.
Shortly after the San Diego court moved to the five-hour schedule, it was allowed to fill three of the six staff slots it had lost, Luddy said. But even with the 48 people now on board, the paper work still dominates the clerks, so the schedule will stay at 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. until the clerks catch up, he said.
To get even, the clerks “obviously” work more than just the five hours a day the office is open to the public, Luddy said. They file and stamp during a standard workday, before and after the public comes and goes, he said.
“Believe me, I hope this is a temporary situation,” Luddy said. “I hope that by the first of the year we’ll go back to the 9 to 4.”
“I’d love to go back to the 7:30 to 5,” Luddy said a couple of minutes later in an interview at his office. “We are a public office. We’re here for service.”
Thompson, the chief judge, said he expects the court will return to expanded hours with the new year.
“My theory was to give (the clerks) this time to catch up,” he said. “They’ve got to reciprocate by reopening. That’s our theory, anyway. I hope it works.”
