Raising an Objection to Delay : Three-year-old reform enacted to speed civil cases seems to be working

Time was, in a race between a snail and the civil justice system in Southern California you would have been wise to bet on the snail. Five years could pass between the filing of a lawsuit and the trial.

Then, three years ago, the Legislature passed the Trial Court Delay Reduction Act. The record is now in: The legislation seems to work. In Orange and Los Angeles counties, it now takes about a year and a half to get to trial; in San Diego, it’s 14 months.

Mimicking their federal court colleagues, state civil court judges now see a case through from start to finish. That’s an improvement over the old system, under which different phases of even complex cases were argued before different judges, requiring each newcomer to sort through all that had gone before. Judges also have cracked down on lawyers’ delaying tactics, causing some grumbling among attorneys. Still, the growing reaction from both sides of the bench is that the new rules reduce paperwork and legal gamesmanship. Those are goals without sustainable objections.

Delays can be painful. When a worker is seriously injured on the job and sues, the medical and legal bills can pile up while the process drags on, sometimes resulting in bankruptcy of the plaintiff. Witnesses disappear or suffer memory lapses and evidence goes astray. The presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court, Robert Mallano, put it bluntly: “We need judges, not lawyers, to manage the caseloads.”

As the truism goes, justice delayed is justice denied.