"Can I get a witness?" goes the old preacher's adage. But
when the witnesses go home, all Portland lawyers want is
a ruling.
Take the case of Cascade Corp., which filed a lawsuit
against a dozen insurance companies several years ago.
The complicated case eventually came to trial and a jury
reached a verdict Sept. 24, 1997, awarding Cascade about
$3 million. Multnomah County Circuit Judge Nely Johnson,
however, did not complete the final ruling until last
Friday--almost two and a half years later.
Asked about the holdup, one lawyer familiar with the
case pointed at Johnson. "It's highly unusual for a judge
to sit on a case for this long," says the lawyer, who
requested anonymity. "Nobody can explain it."
Others, however, point at problems with the system itself.
First, says Multnomah County Presiding Judge James Ellis,
lawyers and plaintiffs are increasingly selecting Multnomah
County Circuit Court in Portland to file the state's most
complex cases, including cases whose link to the county
is tenuous or nonexistent.
Such venue shopping "has a huge impact," says county
bar president Judy Snyder, who concedes, "I'm as guilty
as the next lawyer of trying to file my complex cases
here in Portland." Snyder says the county has lots of
things going for it: good judges, all the major law firms
and ease of transport for out-of-state witnesses.
But the congestion caused by complex cases comes at
a time when Multnomah County's workload calls for 9.6
new judges, according to a 1998 report by the state-appointed
group commonly known as the Gleaves Committee. "We've
been aware of the Multnomah County situation," says Vernon
Gleaves, the Eugene lawyer who chairs the committee. "I
don't think there's any question that it's a severe shortage."
So far, the state Legislature has been unwilling to hire
new judges, but the county is now gearing up to make another
request in the Supreme Court's budget proposal.
What's surprising, says Snyder, is that the court is
running as well as it does. The state asks that counties
process 90 percent of all civil cases filed within 12
months, and in 1998, the last year for which statistics
have been compiled, Multnomah beat that, hitting a mark
of 93 percent.
It's the complex cases that give judges pause--in some
cases, a long pause.
In the Cascade case, the forklift-parts manufacturer
wanted its 12 former insurance companies to assume the
liability for cleanup of groundwater pollution caused
over the course of three decades. The jury ruled in the
company's favor, but the judge had to divvy up who paid
for what.
Judge Johnson declines to discuss the case's specifics,
saying the ruling is still under a confidentiality seal.
Ellis, who handled the case in its early stages, says
her task was immense: "I've never seen anything so complicated
and so difficult."
Ellis says the problem is that circuit judges usually
have to do their own research, and with so many cases
to handle, a judge does not have the time to sit down
and focus on one complex ruling, meaning that the ruling
takes much longer than it should. He says Multnomah has
several cases like Cascade, involving multiple insurers
and years of contamination, and each one is taking a very
long time. In the Cascade case, Johnson had to rule on
issues that will set precedent in Oregon--issues so complex
that lawyers were still filing legal briefs in January.
According to court rules, lawyers are supposed to alert
the presiding judge when a case drags on. In reality,
no lawyer was willing to risk that, at least in the Cascade
case.
"In the end, for our part, we didn't want to tick off
the judge," says a relieved Cascade Corp. president Bob
Warren, "We're just glad to finally have a decision."
Ironically, after all this time, the case is likely to
be appealed. Johnson, for her part, says a likely appeal
is no excuse to issue a shoddy ruling, adding, "That would
be pretty sad for our judicial system."
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Willamette Week | originally
published March 8,
2000
