It''s interesting to see the public perception of the court service. In the 80s things were a lot more relaxed as money was sloshing around the civil service and the wastage from obscene.
However, I can say for certain that judges don''t work from 10-3 with 2 hour lunches!
The workload of a judge is many and varied. They don''t just sit in court hearings for half an hour then twiddle their thumbs until the next one. A judge will have to allocate time to preparing for a hearing, dictating judgements, dealing with ''box work'' which comprises the paper applications sent to court where a hearing is not necessary or applications made within proceedings that need to be considered by the judge where Directions are required.
Lots of people on the forum will object and say that their judge did not prepare for the hearing. Sadly, this is often the case as judges have limited time to prepare and frequently have to work with limited or no papers as the court staff are few on the ground and things get lost in the mountains of paperwork that go through the system on a daily basis.
no organisation in the world is so overstretched that they can''t find one person to attend to you for 30 minutes in the next 133 days.
It is all about volume and judges. If the resources are static or are being reduced yet the rate of family disputes remains the same or increases, the wait until it is your turn remains the same or gets longer.
Certainly, if you kicked up a fuss and could jump the queue you could get an earlier appointment but that means that someone gets bumped further back in the queue. You might think this is reasonable but if you were that person you would probably object.
Quite a few court hearings are adjourned which technically leaves a gap into which another case could step. However, if your hearing is due to start on Tuesday and the court contacts you on Friday asking you to attend on Monday, this could cause problems if you work or have prior commitments.
In those circumstances the judge would revert to box work if they have no hearings but as anybody who attends the family court will quickly realise, cases are usually block listed. This means that a hearing like an FDR will be listed for 10am or 2pm along with several other cases. It is a bun fight as to who sees the judge first and in the absence of lots more judges the position will not change (block listing has been the norm for decades). This doesn’t take into account the emergency list.
In the case of FDRs, judges really do want to see matters settle. Colleagues of mine have been trapped in court at the judge''s behest past 6pm on a Friday (the court staff really dislike this as they have to hang around too) if a case looks as though it might settle with a bit more effort.
This site deals with those people who have had difficulties with the court system or who are beginning their journey without legal representation - those who have been through the system relatively unscathed are not here to report on the successes of the system.
I''m not intending to defend the court system as it has its faults but a lot of the problems could easily be solved with some financial expenditure but this recession thing is really causing a lot grief and finding a few billion is proving to be difficult. Even if the back of the sofa did yield half a billion or so, should it go to the court service, the NHS, local libraries, overseas relief, repairing roads, building prisons etc?
As I''ve said on here several times, the easiest way to resolve your differences is to do it between you without lawyers or the court. That''s all it takes. Most people do that so only the minority require third parties to resolve their differences for them.
Of course, I''m being facetious as those that require court intervention are either unreasonable or their ex is unreasonable or both parties are unreasonable. At that point the court becomes involved but as most people never require the use of the court, why should their taxes be diverted to a system from which they derive no benefit? That''s one for the politicians...
Charles
