Alan Carlson, John Greacen

What Is Happening to State Trial Court Civil Filings? (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A fundamental assumption of court administration since its creation as a profession has been the inevitability of growth. There will always be more cases. This will require ever larger courthouses, more judges, more staff, newer technology, and larger budgets. But what does recent history tell us about civil filings?

What Is Happening to State Trial Court Civil Filings?: The Unsolved Riddles reviews the experience of five states over the last 16-41 years. The findings are confounding and perplexing. Civil filings are not inexorably rising. There was a surge around the Great Recession, but civil case filing levels in state trial courts are at or below levels 20 years ago. Per capita filings have dropped more steeply. Per capita civil case filing levels vary widely, both within states and across states, and cannot be predicted from population levels. Legislative changes affecting court jurisdiction and procedures, such as increasing the limit of the amount in controversy in small claims court, seldom have the expected effect. Case management programs have unintended consequences. Efforts to assist unrepresented litigants have not reversed the decline in small claims filings. State trial courts need to identify more relevant case type categories, track filings levels in greater detail, and pay attention to the impact of legal and procedural changes on filing levels. Finally, courts should realize that filings are a valuable performance measure of public trust and confidence in the judiciary.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: American Bar Association
• Seitenzahl: 284
• Erscheinungstermin: 23. April 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781639054053
• Artikelnr.: 70548565

Autorenporträt

Alan Carlson has worked as a court executive and management consultant in state trial courts for 47 years. He served as Court Executive Officer (court administrator, clerk of court, and jury commissioner) in both the Orange County and San Francisco Superior Courts, as Executive Officer of the Monterey County Superior Court, and Assistant Executive Officer of the Alameda County Superior Court. He has also served as President of Justice Management Institute (court management consultants), Director of Court Services at the Judicial Council of California, and as a Staff Attorney at the National Center for State Courts. He has a JD from the University of California, College of Law, San Francisco, and a BS in industrial engineering and operations research from the University of California at Berkeley.

Alan has worked in four California Superior Courts for a total of 26 years. For 23 years he was the court administrator reporting directly to the judges of the court, and for 15 of these years he also served as the clerk of the court. He has served under 30 Presiding Judges and Chief Justices during his career. Among his accomplishments in these courts are the merger of two levels of trial courts into a unified trial court, implementation of e-filing, the shift to an all-electronic record, business process re-engineering of all trial court operations, and development of portals to assist self-represented litigants in small claims and divorce cases.

As a court management consultant, Alan has worked on projects in 43 state trial courts at the county or city level and 19 state Supreme Courts in 33 states and one foreign country. Areas of particular expertise include criminal case flow management, trial court funding, trial court governance, the development and implementation of policies for public access to court records, and drafting privacy and civil liberties policies for criminal justice systems.

Recently, Alan has written and spoken about what has happened to civil case filings over the last 16 to 41 plus years in five states and the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence applications in the justice system.