Courts Should Not Ask Lawyers To Hurry Up And Wait

One thing litigators know all too well is that most of the time spent in a courthouse is not spent on legal tasks. Rather, lawyers usually need to wait for their case to be called, and the time they spend in front of a judge or other court officer can be rather limited compared to the time they spend in court. This is frustrating, since lawyers could be doing other activities rather than waiting in court, and clients probably wish they did not need to pay lawyers to sit idly around a courthouse. However, courts can manage their affairs in certain ways to reduce the time lawyers waste in court.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was common for courts in a jurisdiction in which I practice to schedule numerous matters to be heard at a particular date and time. Dozens of lawyers might arrive at court for a scheduled 9:30 a.m. appearance even though the court could only take the cases one at a time. To some extent, this makes sense, since people might show up to court a little late, and the court could hear cases in which all of the attorneys were present before other matters were ready to be called. However, other lawyers wasted time waiting around since court officers can only hear a select number of cases at a time.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, this phenomenon largely disappeared. Courts usually scheduled matters for discrete times, typically at hour or half-hour increments. Since people simply needed to log into Zoom at a scheduled time rather than appear in person, attorneys showing up late was rarely an issue. In this situation, attorneys and courts did not waste time waiting around since there was a set time block to discuss matters.

Only once did I see a court schedule dozens of matters at the same time for Zoom appearances, requiring attorneys to wait while cases were called into separate Zoom rooms one at a time. Since all of us were at home or in our offices logging into Zoom, not much time was wasted, since everyone could work on other tasks while waiting. However, parties waste the least time when courts schedule specific periods to conduct court hearings so no one has to wait around.

Now that remote proceedings are mostly a thing of the past for many courts, judicial proceedings are being conducted in a similar way to before COVID-19. Several times this year, I appeared on cases that were calendared for the same time as dozens of other cases, requiring all of the lawyers to wait in court for hours while court staff managed all of the cases that had been scheduled for that date and time.

However, courts should learn the lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic, and implement practices that reduce time wastage. Many courts can schedule matters for discrete times rather than order dozens of lawyers to show up on a given morning and just take the cases one by one as the lawyers fully appear on a matter. Perhaps, for some reason — and I would appreciate someone explaining the reasoning, if they know it — courts prefer to schedule matters en masse. Maybe it is a bigger administrative challenge to schedule matters as discrete units rather than just tell a collection of lawyers on various cases to appear in court on a given morning. However, courts should consider scheduling matters for particular periods so that lawyers waste less time in court.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at [email protected].