Figure 1--Pilot Program Had No Significant Effects:
Time and Cost
The new legislation, the CJRA, required each federal district court to assess its dockets and to develop a plan for civil-case management to reduce costs and delay. To establish an empirical basis for assessing new procedures adopted under the Act, the legislation also provided for an independent evaluation. Ten district courts, denoted "pilot" courts, were required to adopt plans that incorporated certain case management principles. Expectations were high that the implementation of those principles would have substantial effects.
The mandated evaluation, which focused on the consequences of the pilot program, was conducted by RAND's Institute for Civil Justice (ICJ). In a comprehensive five-year effort, the ICJ research team, led by James Kakalik, examined the effects of the CJRA's case management principles on time to disposition, costs, and participants' satisfaction and views of fairness.
To preview the main findings of the evaluation:
The pilot and comparison districts, which are comparable and represent the full range of districts in the United States, encompass about one-third of all federal judges and one-third of all federal case filings.
The pilot districts were required to implement their plans by January 1992; the other 84 districts, including the comparison districts, could implement their plans any time before December 1993.
The case management principles and techniques mandated in the pilot program fall into four basic categories:
Early active judicial management: Having the judge play an active role rather than leaving management of the case to the lawyers.
Judicial management of discovery: Having the judge set time limits and perhaps other controls on the process by which each side discovers information about the other side's case.
Referral of appropriate cases to nonbinding alternative dispute resolution such as arbitration, mediation, and neutral evaluation to supplement the normal court processes.
To evaluate the effects of these principles, the ICJ team compiled the largest and most comprehensive database on the federal courts to date. Selecting a random sample of more than 12,000 cases, they followed them from filing to termination. They surveyed lawyers, litigants, and judges associated with those cases, and received responses from judges on about 3,000 cases, from about 10,000 lawyers, and from about 5,000 litigants. They also used data from court databases and records; from districts' plans, rules, and documents; and from time sheets reflecting a judge's work on each case. Much of this information had never before been available for independent analysis.
The team used multivariate statistical analyses to estimate the relationship between case management and time, cost, satisfaction, and perceptions of fairness. They also interviewed hundreds of people to place the study findings in the context of how the court system operates.
The CJRA called for the creation of advisory groups in each district. The groups' mandate was to assess the condition of the civil dockets, identify the principal causes of delay and excess cost, and make recommendations, which the court was free to accept or reject, for dealing with these problems. The advisory groups were also to provide input to an annual reassessment for each district.
In general, the advisory groups approached their mission with dedication and conscientiousness, and most courts adopted their advisory group's recommendations.
All of the pilot and comparison districts created plans that complied with the loosely worded statutory language of the Act. But the amount of real change varied widely. Some districts did not plan major changes, and, in some districts, planned changes were not fully implemented. Thus, if the spirit of CJRA was experimentation and change, then the districts met that spirit to varying degrees.
Table 1 illustrates this point with respect to differential case management. There are two principal approaches to differential case management, both of which comply with the language of the CJRA. In the judicial discretion approach, the judge individually tailors management for each case. In the track approach, each case is assigned to a specific management track such as standard or complex; the type of management that the case receives is at least partly determined by the track assignment.
Pilot Districts Did Not Fully Implement Differential Case Management
| Stage | Judicial Discretion Approach | Track Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Before CJRA (12/91) | 10 districts | 0 districts |
| Pilot district plans | 4 districts | 6 districts |
| Implementation of plans | 4 districts + 5 districts de facto | 1 district |
Before CJRA, all ten pilot districts used the judicial discretion approach. Subsequently, six districts adopted plans that incorporated tracking. However, only one of them implemented the plan with a substantial volume of cases; the remaining five actually retained the judicial discretion approach in managing the vast majority of their general civil cases.
Interviews with judges and lawyers suggested some reasons a tracking system was not successfully implemented. They include the difficulty in determining the correct track assignment for most civil cases if only the objective data available at case filing are used, and judges' desire to tailor case management to the needs of specific cases and to their own style of management.
As implemented, the CJRA's package of case management policies had little effect on time, costs, or attorneys' satisfaction or views of fairness. This assessment is based on statistical analysis of cases in the pilot and comparison districts, on the results of judicial time studies, and on the survey of judges about how they managed cases before and after CJRA.
Figures 1 and 2 illustrate these findings.
Figure 1--Pilot Program Had No Significant Effects:
Time and Cost
Figure 2--Pilot Program Had No Significant Effects:
Satisfaction and Views of Fairness
Figure 1 shows median months to disposition and median lawyer work hours. The small differences depicted in Figure 1 are not statistically significant. Figure 2 shows a similar pattern of results for participants' satisfaction and views of fairness.
An analysis of the time judges spent on cases sheds further light on the failure of the CJRA pilot program--as implemented--to have much of an effect. The time sheets that judges filled out for each case in the sample revealed that judges did not change the amount of time they spent on civil cases, on average, after CJRA. In addition, judges overwhelmingly said that they did not manage cases any differently after CJRA than before.
However, one aspect of CJRA appears to have had an effect. The Act requires a semiannual report, available to the public, disclosing how many "old" cases each judge has. Although the total number of pending cases has been rising since the CJRA was enacted, the number of 3-year-old cases pending has been declining since this public reporting began.
Why didn't the CJRA generate much change in most districts? There are at least three reasons:
Despite the fact that the pilot program, as implemented, had little overall effect, the wide variation in how individual judges manage cases made it possible to evaluate the effect of specific case management policies, using detailed data from the study's sample of more than 12,000 cases. And the analysts found that what judges do to manage cases does indeed matter. Among the procedures assessed, three warrant particular attention: early judicial case management, early setting of a trial date, and reducing the time to discovery cutoff.
The case-level analysis clearly showed that early judicial management significantly reduced time to disposition, lowering the median time by about 1.5 months. (In this instance, early judicial case management is defined as beginning management within six months of the case's being filed. Alternative definitions of early produced similar results.)
The component of early management that had the biggest effect was setting the trial date early. Indeed, early management that includes setting the trial date early reduces median time by an additional 1.5 to 2 months. Figure 3 illustrates the effect of this component of early management.
Figure 3--Early Judicial Management That Includes Setting the Trial Date Early Further Reduces Time to Disposition
However, the study also found that early judicial management significantly increases the direct cost of litigation, thus debunking the myth that cutting time to disposition necessarily cuts costs. As Table 2 illustrates, cases receiving early management have costs per litigant--legal fees and expenses--that are $3,000 higher and lawyer work hours that are 35 hours longer than they are for other cases.
Early Judicial Management Increases Costs
| Measures of Cost | Early | Not Early |
|---|---|---|
| Costs per litigant (median) | $12,000 | $9,000 |
| Lawyer work hours (median) | 95 | 60 |
In contrast to its effects on time and costs, early judicial management does not significantly affect lawyers' satisfaction with case management or their views of its fairness.
One of the components of judicial control of discovery appears to be a win-win situation: Shortening the median time to discovery cutoff from six to four months
Another component of discovery control failed to produce either the benefits that advocates hoped for or the dire results that critics had predicted: Early mandatory disclosure neither significantly affected time or costs nor generated an explosion of ancillary motions.
Successful use of a case management procedure by some judges on some cases in some districts does not necessarily mean that the procedure will be equally effective if all judges are asked to implement it for all cases. Nevertheless, practices that are effective among judges who currently use them are good candidates for wider implementation. The estimated effects of the policies described above should be viewed as an upper bound on what might be anticipated if the procedures were implemented more widely.
The CJRA evaluation assessed the effects of six different alternative dispute resolution (ADR) programs that included mediation and early neutral evaluation. The study found that, once litigation had begun, referral to ADR was not a panacea, nor was it detrimental. Neither time nor costs nor lawyer views of satisfaction or fairness changed significantly as a result of referral to any of these programs. The finding that ADR had no major effect on litigation cost or delay is generally consistent with the results of prior empirical research on court-related ADR.
The total costs to courts of administering the ADR programs in the districts studied ranged from $130 to $490 per case (1995 dollars). Program start-up costs to district courts ranged from $10,000 to $69,000 (1995 dollars), depending on whether the advisory group or the court did most of the start-up work and whether the district provided training for ADR providers.
The only statistically significant ADR finding pertains to outcomes: Cases referred to ADR were more likely to have a monetary outcome. ADR is a process intended to facilitate settlement, and in a settlement, money is likely to change hands. In addition, fewer cases are dropped without payment or decided by a judge on the basis of motions.
Participants in these ADR programs--both lawyers and litigants--liked them. However, many lawyers and ADR providers thought that the ADR sessions were being held before the parties were ready to settle.
The CJRA included a technique called "other features," intended to give districts some latitude in their plans. One case management approach included in this category is the increased use of magistrate judges in the civil pretrial process.
The evaluation showed that substituting magistrate judges for district judges in pretrial case management did not significantly affect time, costs, or attorneys' views of fairness. However, lawyers were significantly more satisfied when magistrate judges managed the pretrial process, perhaps because the lawyers found them more accessible.
Two broad principles emerge from the CJRA evaluation:
These principles help to define a case management package that could speed cases without significantly affecting costs, satisfaction, or views of fairness. Figure 4 profiles this package.
Figure 4--Profile of Balanced Case-Management Package
On the time dimension: In combination, early judicial case management, early setting of a trial date, and shortening the time to discovery cutoff could reduce median time to disposition by four to five months--about 30 percent of the median time for cases lasting at least nine months.
On the cost dimension: If early management is packaged with reduced time to discovery cutoff, then the increase in costs predicted by the former is offset by the decrease in costs predicted by the latter. The net effect is no significant change in litigation costs.
None of these case management policies affects satisfaction or views of fairness.
For those who hoped that passing the CJRA statute would bring about substantial change in the federal courts, the results described above may be disappointing. But the CJRA experience contains important lessons, well worth our attention:
RAND research briefs summarize research that has been more fully documented elsewhere. This research brief describes work done in the Institute for Civil Justice and published as Just, Speedy, and Inexpensive? An Evaluation of Judicial Case Management Under the Civil Justice Reform Act, by J. S. Kakalik, T. Dunworth, L. A. Hill, D. McCaffrey, M. Oshiro, N. M. Pace, and M. E. Vaiana, RAND MR-800-ICJ, 1996, 51 pp., $8.00, ISBN: 0-8330-2472-8; Implementation of the Civil Justice Reform Act in Pilot and Comparison Districts, by J. S. Kakalik et al., RAND MR-801-ICJ, 1996, 283 pp., $20.00, ISBN: 0-8330-2455-8; An Evaluation of Judicial Case Management Under the Civil Justice Reform Act, by J. S. Kakalik et al., RAND MR-802-ICJ, 1996, 386 pp., $20.00, ISBN: 0-8330-2474-4; and An Evaluation of Mediation and Early Neutral Evaluation Under the Civil Justice Reform Act, by J. S. Kakalik et al., RAND MR-803-ICJ, 1996, 492 pp., $20.00, ISBN: 0-8330-2475-2. These documents are available from National Book Network (Telephone: 800-462- 6420; FAX: 301-459-2118) or from RAND on the Internet (order@rand.org).
For additional information about the Institute for Civil Justice, call Deborah Hensler at (310) 393-0411, x6916, or write to: 1700 Main St., P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138. Internet (Deborah_Hensler@rand.org).
A profile of the ICJ, abstracts of its publications, and ordering information can be found on RAND's home page on the World Wide Web (/icj).
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