33rd / 424th District Courts

An appointment to the 424th bench is still pending. I just got off the phone with Ken Anderson who is the head of the Governor's appointments office and he indicates that the interviews of candidates will occur in September and that we might expect an appointment to be made in late September. The expectation from there, according to Ken, is that the appointee could wind up their practice within two weeks and be ready to report to work.

Therefore, we will continue to use visiting judges during September on about the same basis as last year up to the point in May when the funds dried up.  It might further be expected that we would continue pretty heavy use into October, depending on exactly when the new judge actually gets on board and is ready to handle full dockets.

Questions may exist in inquiring minds as to how the dockets will be allocated between the two courts.  I wish I knew .  Seriously, it will depend a bit on who gets the appointment and what we jointly decide. However, Eva and I are proceeding to map out a master scheduling plan that accounts for two full-time judges. We simply cannot wait. Some of the considerations and goals are:

• Have more predictable days / weeks that a judge is in any given county on each type of docket.
• Maintain, to the greatest extent possible, consistency of a judge on a case. This is especially important for complex family and civil matters that can have a long history where continuity is desirable.
• Provide an adequate frequency of a judge in each county for
  • Motion practice and criminal pretrials
  • Bench trials
  • Jury trials
  • Uncontested matters
• Minimize judge, reporter and lawyer travel.
• Achieve a fair balance of workload between the benches while accounting for the greater administrative load of the local administrative district judge.

 I have written a piece entitled Interplay of multiple judicial districts in an attempt to document the various authorities dealing with multiple districts. While I have known of these provisions anecdotally, and they were taken into account in drafting the enabling legislation, I thought it to possibly be of interest to the bar to have reference to these guiding principles.

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