Thinking About Judicial Economy

       It is good to see some courts really embracing participation at pretrial hearings, motions and other events by telephone. If we added up the transactional costs of attorneys driving to hearings, sitting in the back of court rooms waiting for hearings to commence or otherwise wasted in travel, we could feed a small country with the number of hours billed to and paid for by clients. I am seeing more and more that trial courts are allowing participation at even important motions by phone. While some clients will prefer to pay for travel costs, in person participations should not be mandatory. If don’t find a way to make litigation less time intensive, we will effectively be barring most of the American Population from the court room on a cost basis.