Courts that handle civil matters are expensive. You have to pay for the judges, the staff, the guys in uniform who stand up and yell “all rise,” at least twice a day, plus pensions.  There’s that cool wood paneled room with the odd bench up front so that you know whose jokes to laugh at.  Yes, very expensive.  And still, they take forever to get anything done, because there is always a perfectly reasonable excuse to adhere to formalities that justify taking two years to answer the basic questions that explain why you’re there.

Then someone in LA (yes, I know it happens elsewhere, but this is a post about LA. Get over it.) came up with the really good idea that they could offer a different path. No robe. No big bench. But a free mediator who would help the parties to reach a resolution in short order, saving the litigants a ton of money and time.  No, not for everybody or every case, but for those who didn’t really want to spend the rest of their natural life dicking around a courthouse, alternative dispute resolution offered a viable option.

Via Vickie Pynchon, the folks who hold the purse strings in LA have decided that in this age of severe budgetary constraints, something must go.  So why not the quick, easy, free service?

In response to brutal budget cuts, the Los Angeles Superior Court is going on life-support at the same time as it abolishes programs that would make the delivery of justice faster, cheaper and more efficient.

Most startling of all court service cuts is the total shut down of all court-run ADR programs – including the free mediation services that settle thousands of lawsuits every year.

In an announcement posted on line at the end of November, the Court concluded its list of budget casualties by “encouraging” (read: begging) L.A. County lawyers to make fewer motions and pursue alternative dispute resolution processes (mediation, arbitration) in the private market.

See what they did there?  It’s not that they are against ADR, but just want to get the government out of the business of ADR and put it back where it belongs, in the private sector where the cost will be on the shoulders of litigants.  Even though free services are, well, free, and the cost savings of running free services is well, not much.

But this way, the administration of the court system can proclaim that they’ve cut services to prove their thrift and sensitivity to the fiscal demands of modern society.  What a great bunch of administrators.

As bad as the systemic problems with the criminal justice system may be, it’s got nothing over the civil legal system when it comes to delay, inefficiency and ineffectiveness.  It doesn’t have to be this way, if judges took charge of the conduct of litigation before them, stuck to the rule and imposed sanctions on lawyers who viewed the rules of civil procedure as marginally advisory.  But then, lawyers would whine incessantly about how they have a vacation coming up, their car got a flat and they couldn’t possibly advance their client’s cause without 32 rounds of games in responding to interrogatories.

The elimination of the alternative dispute resolution system is a huge step backward in providing society what the court system refuses, a speedy and inexpensive means of deciding dispute and reaching closure.  While some people refuse to ever admit they were wrong, or that the law doesn’t back up whatever insanity compels them to believe they have no duty to be careful or fulfill their contractual obligations, most rational people can appreciate that there are differing views, not necessarily unreasonable, but someone must ultimately be right and someone must be wrong.

These people don’t want to spend the next decade financing the lawyer’s kid’s college education or getting monthly bills for certified letters on a disputed issue that could have been wrapped up in a single phone call.  They just want their respective rights heard and decided, so they can move on to more important and useful endeavors.  This is what ADR does well.

But the LA legal system said something had to go, so why not make it one of the few things that works well, serves people and doesn’t cost much?  After all, it’s not like they could rid themselves of the guy in the robes who would never tell a lawyer to get his damn papers in within the time frame the law requires.  After all, if they did, who would sit on that cool bench?

H/T Stephanie West Allen