The New York civil court system is supposed to serve as an integral resource for residents seeking access to justice. But a slew of recent cuts, combined with an influx of cases in some courts, has significantly slowed the wheels of justice in the city, and attorneys, advocates, judges and court staff say that it’s a serious problem.

The root of the problem is that New York state’s courts have been tasked with doing more with less—$170 million less. While that impact has been spread around the state, many courts in New York City have seen dramatic effects.

At the end of last year, the New York City Lawyers’ Association (NYCLA) commissioned a report (see sidebar), conducted by its task force on judicial budget buts, to find out the impact of the 2011-2012 fiscal year cuts. They surveyed 759 people, including private practice attorneys, court system employees, government attorneys and judges. Over 80 percent of respondents reported that they strongly agreed or agreed that the court’s efficiency has been compromised and that the budget cuts have had a negative effect of the administration of justice.

The cuts include offering early retirement packages and putting a freeze on hiring new employees, in addition to layoffs. Interpreters are harder to find, and security has been reduced. The courts have also practically eliminated overtime, and in perhaps the biggest and most consequential change, implemented shorter hours, closing the courts at 4:30 p.m. instead of 5:00 p.m.

“It was a drastic budget cut that had not happened before. The court budget had not been slashed in decades,” said David Bookstaver, communications director for the New York state court system. “We are good partners in government. We realize our budget was cut because of the incredibly difficult fiscal times that the state was going through at the time.”

The cuts come as a direct result of a dire budget situation for the entire state. Although the state court system, as a third and separate branch ofgovernment, doesn’t submit its budget in the same way that state agencies do, it is not immune to the fiscal crisis that has hit every state-funded entity in the past year.

Bookstaver said that the chief administrative judge, A. Gail Prudenti, who supervises the administration and operation of the state’s trial courts, did not take the cuts she imposed lightly.

“We have not had to lay off anyone in the court system in almost two decades, and we had to lay off over 400 employees,” Bookstaver said. “The chief judge felt that the court’s mission was to not close courthouse doors, as other states were forced to do.”

Slashing services and staff across the board was the better alternative to closing courts for a full day every week, Bookstaver said, but acknowledged that that extra half an hour lost every day isn’t just two and a half hours a week. The reduction in overtime allowances means that if a witness in a trial is ready to testify at 4 p.m., a judge might push the testimony to the next day, instead of risking running past 4:30 p.m. In the past, judges would routinely stay until 5:30 or 6 p.m. in order to finish out a motion or hearing, so the real time lost is much more substantial than a scant 30 minutes.

“You will start a hearing and continue it weeks later,” said Stewart Aaron, the president of NYCLA. “There are these long delays in getting resolutions with matters that are important to the litigants, leaving people and issues in complete limbo. Obviously that’s not the way to administer justice.”

Some attorneys say that the cuts disproportionately affect those who should be getting the most help to navigate the system
“We saw an almost immediate impact on the court, because there were both layoffs and earlier closures. The shortened hours definitely are a hardship in civil court,” said Dora Galacatos, senior counsel to the Feerick Center for Social Justice at Fordham Law School and a volunteer with the Civil Legal Advice and Resource Office, which helps low-income New Yorkers being sued for debt collection. Galacatos said that the court heard over 134,000 debt collection cases in 2011 alone, and that the defendants in these cases often have a difficult time getting through the process.

“Many of them are economically distressed and working poor people, so shortened hours mean less flexibility in getting to the court,” Galacatos said. Other services designed to help working people, like free childcare programs, have been cut, forcing parents to drag small children through a day in court. Small claims court used to stay open several nights each week to accommodate people who work during the day, and is now only open on one night.

The cuts have a ripple effect on litigants and the system as a whole. If someone is supposed to be in court at 3:45 p.m., they might take off work and head down to the courthouse with time to spare, only to be met with a longer-than-normal line to get through security and into the doors, due to reduced staff. Earlier closing times with less wiggle room means people are more likely to miss their times altogether, further burdening the court calendar.

In housing court, which is a specialized court that only exists in New York City, the urgent problems people come to address—tenants not receiving crucial services or landlords not receiving rent—are often stretched out and resolved in a matter of months instead of weeks.

“Let’s say you have a landlord/tenant proceeding, a simple, easy case,” said Glenn Spiegel, a real estate and housing attorney and partner with the Newman Ferrara law firm. “The landlord starts a case against a tenant because the tenant didn’t pay their rent. How long is it going to take the landlord to get their apartment back? The landlord isn’t a corporate landlord, it’s an individual, relying on those rents to pay the mortgage debt. How much longer does it take the landlord to evict that tenant that’s not paying?”

In his experience, it’s now taking two or three months for these kinds of cases, Spiegel said—and that’s if everything is perfectly by the book with no mistakes in the paperwork. If something has to be resubmitted, that can double the amount of time, he said.

Spiegel said that these types of delays could also have greater ramifications for all renters in general in the city. Landlords, knowing that if a tenant doesn’t pay up they won’t have a quick recourse to get them out, could become more skittish in choosing renters and raise their required income threshold, locking lower and middle income residents out.
It’s costing everyone more money to drag out cases, whether in legal fees or time spent away from work.

“It’s already expensive enough to be involved in litigation. If you have to sue somebody, you’re talking about a private case,” Spiegel said, adding that he doesn’t like having to explain to his clients why a proceeding that should take a lot less time and cost them less is suddenly going on for much longer.

Family court litigants are suffering as well. Briana Denney practices matrimonial and family law through her firm Newman & Denney, and said that she’s unfortunately grown accustomed to incredibly lengthy cases over the past year.

“Families are really in crisis by the time they go to the court system, and most people have an expectation that it’s going to be dealt with expeditiously,” Denney said. “The cutbacks have really impacted how much time judges have to deal with people. Unless it’s the worst of the worst, like serious abuse, things are getting pushed out for months or even years.”

Denney recalled a custody case where a divorced mother moved out of state with her child, legally, and when the father sought to change the custody arrangement and get the child back, the judge sided with him—three years later.

“It’s a strain financially, and it’s a huge emotional strain,” Denney said. “When the issues are dealing with kids and visitation and custody, everything is in flux and it’s really stressful for [kids] too.”

Some involved with the courts say that the slowdown can’t be attributed to budget cuts alone, however. Louise Seeley is the executive director of Housing Court Answers, an independent group with a contract from the city to set up information tables inside housing court buildings, in order to assist pro se litigants—both tenants and landlords—who appear for housing cases and need help to understand the process and their rights.

“It’s hard to tell how much of it is the cutbacks or the economy, because filings are up,” Seeley said about the backlog in housing court. She said that some days there is standing room only at the clerk’s office. “With the economy, more people are falling behind on their rent. It’s a combination of less people being able to staff windows combined with increased filings.”

Another aspect of the economy that still haunts the courts is the foreclosure crisis. State Sen. Liz Krueger said that she’s heard from many judges how backlogged the civil court system has become across the state because of the avalanche of foreclosure cases that have inundated the courts.

“There still is an enormous problem with cases coming before the courts with whoever is doing the foreclosure does not have the correct paperwork and doesn’t have the facts, and the judge has to put a delay in the case and call them back,” Krueger said. “It’s a continuing saga of an enormous waste of court resources as well as pain to the people who are at risk of losing their homes.”

Krueger said that she’s supported increasing filing fees in certain cases in order to help alleviate some of the courts’ budget constraints, enabling them to hire more clerical staff and get everything running faster, but that none of the state bar associations have supported this kind of measure.

“If the banks created this problem, I think the banks should have an obligation through increased filing costs for going to court, to pay for the increased burden on our courts to ensure that justice is done correctly,” Krueger said of the foreclosure cases.

The Office of Court Administration is gearing up for another budget season and preparing to present next year’s fiscal budget proposal this December. While no one believes that the cuts will be fully restored, there is hope that enough outrage will bring back some of programs and staff.

“The civil court is the people’s court. It used to be the jewel of the judicial branch,” said Spiegel. “There has to be a better solution than limiting access to the courts.”

The only certain things in life, the saying goes, are death and taxes. Manhattan residents might add Surrogate’s Court to that list. The little-known but immensely important court is headed by two judges in New York County, and one of those seats will be vacated by retiring Judge Kristin Booth Glen next year.

Two candidates are vying for that seat—which comes with a 14-year term—in a Democratic primary Sept. 13. With low voter turnout expected, the candidates, Judge Rita Mella and Judge Barbara Jaffe, are campaigning not just for themselves, but for awareness of what the court actually does.

The Surrogate’s Court handles all matters of a person’s estate after they’re dead—probate of wills, appointing executors, handling litigation that arises—as well as adoption and guardianship cases. It’s the last place people expect to find themselves but the first recourse for loved ones when a person passes away and leaves anything—no matter how small in value—behind. The average person may not put too much thought into Surrogate’s Court, but its relevance is unavoidable.

“Everybody dies. It’s applicable to your life inevitably,” said Michael Oliva, an independent political consultant who advised current Judge Nora Anderson in her successful campaign in 2008. “People think of it as only for wealthy people, but it’s not necessarily that. Basically it’s a city agency to facilitate people’s proceedings when somebody dies.”

In this court, the judge’s job is to follow the letter of the law when it comes to wills and estates, while also remaining sensitive to the nuances of family dynamics, shifting financial situations and the fact that not everyone adequately prepares for the instance of their death, leaving much up to the court. When a person in Manhattan dies without an heir or a will, it’s up to the court to appoint an executor or guardian, a position that can bring in hefty fees.

“It’s a very powerful position because they’re one of two elected surrogates. They really control the flow of wealth from one generation to another and how quickly and expeditiously and easily it might be handled,” said Christine Shiebler, an attorney with Roe Taroff Taitz and Portman LLP who has represented estates in Suffolk County surrogate court for over 17 years.

“Every will, if it’s going to be utilized by a decedent’s family, it’s got to be probated,” Shiebler said. “Even if you have a very small estate with a very insular family structure, you still go through the same process that someone with billions of dollars does.”

The power of the position also presents the possibility of corruption. In 2004, Brooklyn surrogate judge Michael Feinberg was removed from the bench after it was found that he improperly awarded almost $9 million worth of guardianship fees to a close friend. Sitting Manhattan surrogate Judge Nora Anderson was delayed in being sworn in by a trial; she was accused of breaking campaign finance law by accepting a larger-than-legal contribution from attorney Seth Rubenstein. Anderson was acquitted of all charges and took her place on the bench. Bronx surrogate Judge Lee Holzman was found this summer to have committed official misconduct on the job when he failed to fire an attorney who charged excessive fees to estates to which he was appointed, because Holzman and the attorney were old friends; he may face removal as a result.

Judges Jaffe and Mella both pledge to bring more transparency to the court if elected and to shift the reputation of the court from secretive, shady institution for the rich to an accessible resource for the public. They’re also both faced with proving themselves to a voting public that doesn’t necessarily know what to look for in a surrogate judge, a fact that some say makes high-profile endorsements, like those from the New York Times and the New York City Bar Association, all the more important.

“The first thing you want is somebody who is smart. You got to have the academic goods,” said Lawrence Mandelker, an attorney with the law firm Kantor Davidoff Wolfe Mandelker Twomey & Gallanty who specializes in election law and has represented numerous judicial candidates. Temperament and patience are also paramount qualities.

“You shouldn’t be before a tyrant, you shouldn’t be before an idiot; you should be before a judge whoruns a courtroom in a professional and respectful manner,” Mandelker said. “You want common sense, because most cases get settled, they don’t get tried.”

In fact, a large part of the surrogate judge’s job is administrative, and they have a great deal of influence over the court’s staff and how the court is run, so things like management style and personality also come into play.

“Sensitivity itself is important, and the ability to relate to a wide array of people from different economic strata,” Oliva said of what voters should look for in a candidate. “But the most important thing is understanding the law.”

Dispelling the Past Image of the Surrogate’s Court

Judge Rita Mella is running a campaign for Surrogate’s Court based on love.

“People ask me all the time, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” Mella said in a recent interview. “I tell them, because I fell in love with this court and I found it so interesting and intellectually challenging and I really enjoy the work.”

Mella got her feet wet in Brooklyn’s Surrogate Court as the principal law clerk for Judge Margarita Lopez Torres. She helped the then-new surrogate manage the court and also implemented measures to increase the efficiency and transparency of the court system there, something she hopes to do in Manhattan.

“I believe we can improve this court. I believe we can increase access to justice and make it less suspicious to people,” Mella said. She wants to dispel the vision of the Surrogate’s Court as the bastion for the wealthy or a place where only complex, high-profile cases are resolved. Achieving that goal will depend on how the court is managed and presented to the public, she said.

“The management of the court is important because the surrogate judge will decide the substantive matters, and is the administrative judge of the courts,” Mella said. “This is a court where most matters are decided administratively. Last year in the Manhattan Surrogate’s Court there were 10,100 proceedings filed. There were only 12 hearings or trials. That’s why it is so important to have a judge in there that has had the experience working in this court.”

She also cited the fact that with a huge caseload and only two judges, the new judge will be expected to learn the job quickly.
“Unlike other courts where there are 20 judges or 25 judges or even 15 judges … in this court, the first day of the new judge is another day in the life of the court, and you have to hit the ground running,” she said.

Mella is hoping to implement some new practices at the court if she is elected. Though the Manhattan court has avoided corruption scandals like those that have tarnished other counties, she says that “does not mean that the court could not use some new ideas.”
Some of those ideas include creating a website for the Public Administrator’s Office, the agency that the court appoints to administer estates when a person dies without a will, so that the public can be kept abreast of how the office functions and the fees it receives. She would also post more public information about the court online, like case dockets and other court business.

She would also look to increase the diversity of the court’s staff and the people who work with the court by reaching out to educate populations who might be intimidated by the court’s reputation.

“One of the biggest challenges of this court is the way people perceive it,” Mella said. “Everybody thinks of the Surrogate’s Court as a very exclusive club, as a very elitist institution, as a secret place to which not many people have access. I believe that this perception discourages members of the public as well as attorneys—it discourages participation by a broader range of the population and the bar.”

Mella was elected to civil court in 2006 and serves as a criminal court judge in Manhattan. She also teaches administrative law at CUNY Law School, where she got her degree in 1991. She was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States when she was 22. Mella is a member of numerous professional and bar associations, including the National Association of Women Judges, the Association of Judges of Hispanic Heritage and the Judicial Friends.

With an Eye Toward Compassion and Entrepreneurship

Judge Barbara Jaffe didn’t always envision herself in black robes sitting on the bench. She began her career as an administrator for a wholesale arts and antiques company for almost eight years.

But even though she found her true passion in the law, she still cites her business background and arts expertise as unique qualities that would be a great boon to a Surrogate’s Court judge.

“I sat in the auctions, I bought and sold goods, I took care of the paperwork, I paid the bills, I invoiced customers, I paid employees,” she said of her time in the arts world. “I didn’t really like it, so I went to law school and I never looked back, but I know how to manage. Those management skills and entrepreneurial skills that I obtained in the business will help me in looking at the issues in the Surrogate’s Court.”

She also has seen her fair share of art appraisals and knows her way around an expensive painting, something that could come in handy for a court that is often tasked with placing a value on pricey collections.

Jaffe has been a judge for the past 10 years, after serving as an attorney and law clerk, and she’s currently on the state Supreme Court hearing matrimonial cases. She often hears extremely emotional cases, dealing with divorce, division of assets and child custody, experience that she hopes will translate well to dealing with surrogate cases where there is often the fraught element of a deceased family member to contend with in addition to legal issues.

“It’s a terrible thing to divorce; it’s a terrible thing to lose a loved one, and so being in court is not optimal emotionally,” said Jaffe. “In Surrogate’s Court, you have siblings, cousins, whatever, who fight, and it really does break my heart. I really want to see to it that those cases are resolved as quickly as possible so that people can put these problems behind them.”

Compassion and openness are important elements of what makes the Surrogate’s Court successful, Jaffe said.

“It’s got to be made comfortable for everybody, including nontraditional families who have not always received a welcome embrace. You never stop educating staff about sensitivity to all kinds of people—from nontraditional families, from non-English-speaking communities,” she said. “Surrogate’s Court is now more than ever dealing with self-represented litigants who don’t know about the system, and it’s a fairly complex procedure in the Surrogate’s Court.”

Jaffe produced a legal handbook for the criminal court that has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Russian and French and distributed around the state, and she plans to do the same for Surrogate’s Court.

Jaffe also prides herself on being highly productive.

“Motions don’t languish with me,” she said. “I have decided thousands of motions in serious civil matters, in hotly contested civil cases involving a lot of money, and I’ve been reversed only once. That bears out that I’m not only swift, but I am careful.”

While she hasn’t worked in the Surrogate’s Court, Jaffe said that her experience as a judge in similar situations—dealing with emotionally charged cases or high-value assets—gives her the right qualifications.

“I already have judicial experience taking care of these matters. Not just experience as an attorney or a court employee, but real judicial experience, which I don’t think you can substitute anything for,” Jaffe said.

Jaffe is currently the co-chair of the Committee on Professional Ethics and Discipline for the New York Women’s Bar Association. She also serves on the Committee on the Supreme Court, the Pro Bono Committee and the Committee on LGBT Issues for the New York County Lawyers’ Association.

President Barack Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, would be the fourth female justice, serving alongside two other women from New York City. But Kagan would be the only sitting justice from Manhattan—the Upper West Side, to be exact.

While the Brooklyn-bred Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught at Columbia Law School and Antonin Scalia was raised in Queens, Kagan is the quintessential Upper West Sider. She was raised in a Jewish household at 320 West End Ave. and West 75th Street. Her mother taught at Hunter College Elementary School, a public school for gifted students that Elena attended, and her father was a tenants’ rights lawyer who twice chaired Community Board 7.

All three of the Kagan children followed in their parents’ footsteps. Irving teaches at Hunter College High School and Marc is on the faculty of Bronx High School of Science. Their sister pursued both academia and law.

After graduating from Hunter College High School, Kagan attended Princeton as an undergraduate and got her law degree from Harvard. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, taught at the University of Chicago, served in the Clinton Administration working on domestic policy and landed back at Harvard Law School as a faculty member. She was named dean in 2003, becoming the first woman to serve in that role.

In 2009, Obama selected her as the first female solicitor general. In that capacity, she argued cases for the U.S. government in front of the Supreme Court. After the longest-serving justice, John Paul Stevens, announced his retirement in April, Obama announced May 10 that Kagan would be his nominee.

At the White House press conference, the president praised her legal scholarship and hinted at the role he’d like to see her play on the court.

“Elena is respected and admired not just for her intellect and record of achievement, but also for her temperament—her openness to a broad array of viewpoints; her habit, to borrow a phrase from Justice Stevens, ‘of understanding before disagreeing’; her fair-mindedness and skill as a consensus-builder,” Obama said in published remarks.

Kagan, in her remarks, reflected on the influence of her parents, both of whom were immigrants and the first in their families to attend college.

“If this day has just a touch of sadness in it for me, it is because my parents aren’t here to share it,” Kagan said. “My father was the kind of lawyer who used his skills and training to represent everyday people and to improve a community.  My mother was a proud public schoolteacher, as are my two brothers—the kind of teachers whom students remember for the rest of their lives. My parents’ lives and their memory remind me every day of the impact public service can have, and I pray every day that I live up to the example they set.”

Though she spent years in academia, Kagan also had an eye on politics. At 20, she worked on Democrat Liz Holtzman’s 1980 Senate campaign. According to a recent article in the Daily Princetonian, a young Kagan drank vodka tonics that election night and wept when she learned that Holtzman had lost to Alfonse D’Amato. A writer for the student newspaper then, Kagan reflected on growing up in Manhattan during a time when those who won office were “real Democrats—not closet Republicans that one sees so often these days but men and women committed to liberal principles and motivated by the ideal of an affirmative and compassionate government,” the New York Times reported. The piece represents one of the few clues to Kagan’s political views.

During the Holtzman race, she crossed paths with now-Borough President Scott Stringer, then just starting out in Upper West Side politics.

“She comes from a great West Side family,” Stringer said. “This is a neighborhood that plays such a critical role in community-based planning. Growing up here gives her such a depth of passion and knowledge beyond her incredible education experience.”

Her father, Robert Kagan, chaired Board 7 from 1969 to 1971 and again from 1974 to 1975. He was a vocal critic of the Westway project, which would have moved the West Side Highway underground and added an expressway in Lower Manhattan.

As a housing lawyer, her father also helped ensure that the 20-block West Side Urban Renewal Area included low-income housing alongside market rate residences.

“He shared a commitment of many, many people [on the Upper West Side] that the community stay a diverse and mixed community,” said Ruth Messinger, a former City Council member who knew Robert Kagan from the community board. “That was evident in his work. That was obviously part of his professional, as well as his personal, life.”

Sally Goodgold, a community board colleague of Robert Kagan’s who is now a board member at several local organizations, described a closely-knit family that emphasized community service.

“They were a team, this family,” Goodgold said. “They did their own decisions based on the law and what was good for the city. I think she will carry that legacy with her.”