Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

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No, this isn’t about corruption in Illinois politics…that’s on display live in at least 3 courtrooms at the federal court for the Northern District of Illinois down the street. The issues I’m talking about are systemic inadequacies that affect all 25,000 or so litigants within the state court system within Cook County on a yearly basis. The issues reared their ugly head again in a case I had this week…

1.  An inadequate court case filing system

2.  No electronic or human transcription system within most courtrooms

I don’t mean to beat a dead horse on this…it is a critical issue. And hey, we did eventually get the Daley Center law library to add WiFi so somebody must be listening/reading. First the facts and then the legal consequences and then my personal experience in court this past week.

THE FACTS: The Cook County Circuit Court Clerk uses a primarily paper-based filing system that is difficult to access and more importantly isn’t secure whereby old filings/court orders are lost and gone forever. Due to the storage needs required by a paper-based system, the even inadequate case files are rarely in court when a case is heard in court thus making judges wholly dependent on what attorneys/litigants produce. Finally, there’s no real-time electronic transcription occurring within courtrooms and the Cook County Official Court Reporters office simply cannot staff the hundreds of court rooms throughout the county.

THE LEGAL CONSEQUENCES: Simply, incorrect rulings/judgments are entered and that’s the injustice. And it’s not the individual making the ruling/judgment, it’s the inadequacy of the data upon which individual is forced to relay in making the ruling/judgment (See THE FACTS) which causes the incorrect ruling/judgment. A fair analogy would be the President relying on intelligence that in retrospect is like a 25% snapshot of reality in making foreign policy decisions…not a good decision-making environment.

I don’t think a lot of non-court attorneys or lay-people grasp the very large percentage of current and future litigation that relates wholly to the enforcement/vacating of/modification of previous pleadings and orders thus making the accuracy of a court file and case history critical. Within the domestic relations division I’d say 40%+ of the cases in court every day are in the enforcement/vacate/modify box. I don’t know the exact number that 40% translates into but I’d surmise it’s somewhere between 500-1,000 cases every day in Cook County Circuit Court.

MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE/EXAMPLE: This week I had a Motion to Vacate an old court order heard in court this week and it’s a great practical snapshot to illuminate the gravity of the problem. And in the end justice actually prevailed but not until some 6 months of wasted time and the potential for injustice was very likely despite my and a client’s best efforts. So here’s what happened…

Some 6 months ago my then pro se client sets several pleadings for hearing on court date #1. Next, opposing party files a motion to dismiss my client’s pleadings at court date #2 and motion to dismiss is set for hearing. Here’s where the system’s inadequacies first raise their ugly head because the hearing date originally set at court date #1 was supposed to be stricken at court date #2 but the wrong date got stricken because no one was in a position to view the actual order entered at court date #1 while in court at court date #2. Also at court date #2, various response times were set forth and the opposing party’s motion to dismiss was set for hearing a couple months after the hearing date set at court date #1 (note, this date was intended to be stricken but wasn’t so it’s still out there as an active court date). On court date #3 (which is the hearing date originally set at court date #1 that should have been stricken) the opposing party’s lawyer appears but my pro se client does not thinking this hearing date had been stricken. Well, this fine, upstanding lawyer goes ahead and by default has my client’s various pleadings dismissed with prejudice despite the fact that she surely knew the Motion to Dismiss had a subsequent hearing date set at court date #3.

Well, to some degree all is well that ends well and the court did vacate the dismissal order entered at court date #3 this past week. But I’m sure there are hundreds of cases where the opposite occurs. And I’d surmise that if the Cook County filing/transcribing system is better that this simply would NOT occur. Because if the judge has the 2 orders from court dates #1 and #2 in front of him at court date #3, there’s no way the dismissal occurs at court date #3 because the order entered at court date #2 clearly sets a hearing day several months after court date #3 & my client’s time to answer the motion to dismiss had not even expired yet by court date #3.

I know we’re in tough budget times, but this IS a BIG DEAL!

Okay so not only do us domestic relations lawyers get the most ARDC complaints filed against us but now we’ve seen two of us get jailed in the last 6 months by judges up on the 30th Floor. Here’s the bit regarding the most recent jailing…

I’m not jumping to any conclusions on this situation. I know and respect the judge doing the jailing greatly in this case and I believe the judicial canon of ethics never allows judges to respond to these sorts of situations so we’ll likely never know the full story. A tad scary though…both jailings are along the same corridor where most of my cases are.