Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

That was music to my ears (not!) yesterday afternoon as I had just finished up a mildly successful and very involved court hearing that had spanned a couple of hours in a Cook County courtroom. A couple clients, I, and a judge had just gone through a rigorous hearing dealing with issues that are going to impact their and a child’s life for 15+ years and we finish up at maybe 415pm and that’s the statement I get from the court’s clerk. I guess Daley was right when he spoke of City employees (my example of course is a Cook County employee):

Daley said Wednesday city employees are “clock-watchers” who don’t think about customers. He contends workers in the private sector are going to make sure the customer is satisfied.

And I’m not going to generalize about all government employees, there are some excellent folks out there and even some judges clerks I could name off the top of my head who are very customer friendly. But come on!

And bridging to a related matter…

Isn’t the outright practice of rushed, scribbled, hand-written court orders one of the worst aspects of our justice system?

Yesterday afternoon being a good example where some 7-10 nuanced issues were ruled on…who wants a rushed, error-prone court order? I just addressed a couple of bare bones items yesterday and will come back with a final Order. But oftentimes you do have to enter your “final” Order in the crappy, rushed format.

So our system includes well-paid judges and lawyers spending time and money preparing for and filing extensive pleadings and doing intricate legal research that takes time and effort, ect. and then the results are often entered by way of rushed, scribbled court orders.

BUT, THE ORDER/JUDGMENT IS THE THING THAT REALLY MATTERS!

I don’t practice in the federal system much, I think they do things different/better there. Some of the collar counties at least are recording everything that’s said in the courtroom so you can pull that record after the fact if the order doesn’t match. In Cook you don’t have that and at best you’d be relying on a judge’s handwritten notes.

I have to waste a couple hours next week to bring a nunc pro tunc motion due exactly to the above…a rather involved ruling was issued and the handwritten order that got entered was wrong.