A timely article per our discussion....
newsday.com
Study Shows Fewer Cases Going to Trial
By Associated Press
December 14, 2003, 5:57 AM EST
SAN FRANCISCO -- Americans are still filing lawsuits, but fewer cases are going to trial, according to a new study commissioned by the American Bar Association.
In a review of federal court data, law professor Marc Galanter found just 1.8 percent of all civil cases filed in federal court went to trial last year. By comparison, 11.5 percent of the cases went to trial in 1962, the first year covered by the study.
At a conference Saturday to discuss the findings, other experts presented data from state court systems that largely reflected the same trend, said Debbie Weixl, a spokeswoman for the American Bar Association.
The study prepared by Galanter, who teaches law at the University of Wisconsin and the London School of Economics, found that Americans are still filing plenty of suits. Last year there were five times as many federal lawsuits as four decades ago -- 258,876 in 2002 compared to 50,320 in 1962.
But the rate at which cases go to trial has fallen so rapidly that there were actually fewer trials in 2002 than in 1962 -- 4,569 last year compared to 5,802 four decades ago.
The other cases are settled by both parties, dismissed by judges or settled by a judge based only on documents submitted by the litigants.
Galanter attributed the decline in trials to a combination of factors, including the high cost of litigation and a change in attitude by judges.
"They no longer think their prime purpose is to move things along to trial. They see themselves as dispute settlers," Galanter said.
Patricia Lee Refo, a lawyer from Phoenix, Ariz., and the head of the Bar Association section that commissioned the study, said judges push to settle cases because they often are overwhelmed by a growing caseload.
"Judges increasingly view their mission as case resolution instead of being trial judges," she said.
Corporations often try to avoid trials because they perceive then as risky ventures that could result in large judgments, Refo said.
The cases that are ending without trials should be studied further, Refo said. She said legal experts should determine whether those cases are being settled because all parties are satisfied, or because people fear the expense or are being pushed to settle by the system. The latter causes would be troubling, she said.
Galanter noted that trials often provide guideposts to help settle future cases. In that sense, the "vanishing trial" could be a problem, he said.
"We don't really know a whole lot about the effects" of the decline in trials, he said. "But there are certainly some troubling things about it."
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press |
