On 10/15/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Say, Fred. Since you're a retired lawyer, are there any other approaches we might borrow from real-world court systems?
Well, if I can answer this as a law student...
[[Case management]] is a very poor article currently but that's one idea that immediately springs to mind. That's the concept of having, particularly at the trial level, the same judge assigned to every motion, hearing etc in a given proceeding. This ensures that a judge hearing an interlocutory application, for example, will be familiar with the facts of that case and will be able to make a quick decision, and also allows judges to have a greater influence over how cases proceed (since the lawyers typically have less free reign).
The way that clerks are assigned to cases at the moment is very similar to this, but we could possibly extend this to Arbitrators by having a single one assigned to each case, who could handle all the motions or injunctions raised during the case, or be responsible for the maintenance of the workshop page.