How do we deliver consistently speedy and timely results in justice? Do we focus on making deadlines that encourage/necessitate timeliness? Or do we begin with the culture? Perhaps we need both. But what do we begin with? This seems like a chicken-and-egg question: Do good deadlines produce a timely culture, or does a timely culture produce timely deadlines? We at Timely Justice suggest that timely deadlines depend on a culture of timeliness to work.
There are some good examples of this. A timely culture begins with conscientious leadership. We’ve posted a few stories of individuals who rapidly increased the case closures in their respective dockets such as Thomas More, John Cooke, and most recently, Albert V. Bryan Jr., the founder of the Rocket Docket. It’s key to note that none of these three invented a brand-new system that was more efficient than the rest. Rather, they were all exceptionally conscientious and expected the same conscientious results on their dockets. More, Cooke, and Bryan took on prodigious workloads and expected nothing more of the dockets they worked on than what they could do.
Bryan, in particular, had a few interesting “innovations.” In his time as a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) from 1971 to 1991 and as Chief Judge from 1985-1991 he more than halved the two-year national median case closure time in the EDVA from two years to eleven months. He took on four times the case load as his fellow judges, opposed almost every continuance, drastically cut witness lists to the most essential ones of the parties’ choice, and required everyone to sit in court and be ready fifteen minutes earlier than the official beginning of the hearing. Occasionally, he would begin session a few minutes before the official hearing was to begin. Such tactics create a timely culture by teaching the people in a given system that timeliness depends not only on cutting out unnecessary waste that takes time, but on being alert, focused, and proactive in dealing with a case. A sense of pace is vital to solving challenging cases.
India has noticed how important a timely judicial culture is. No matter how often new rules and deadlines are implemented in the Indian Justice system, there is seems nothing that the bureaucracy cannot delay. In 2010, The Times of India speculated that it would take 320 years to clear the backlog of India. In 2011, The National Mission for Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms was set up as a response to the colossal volume of cases. The idea was to increase “access by reducing delays and arrears in the system and enhancing accountability through structural changes and by setting performance capacities.” In 2018, Indian government think tank NITI Aayog said that catching up would take 324 years! Law Pedia, writing for the Times of India, published an article called “Judicial Delay in India” on February 20, 2023. More than half of the reasons they suggest for the abysmal delay and backlog in the Indian courts are culture related: (1) “Poorly drafted orders;” (2) judges are often incompetent and inefficient; (3) absence of work culture; and (4) endless amendments. Reforms can make little headway in the face of a stubborn culture.
