Seems like this must be a very judge-dependent and judge-controlled thing? I imagine lawyers must want to try to throw in the kitchen sink and have tons and tons of witnesses going down every rabbit hole, but the judge has to say no to some things.
Do they set a time limit based on the complexity of the topic? Do they make a gut feel call about whether any particular witness actually adds new information and say “that’s enough”?
Can the judge “game” this and favor one side (intentionally or unintentionally if they don’t believe the side saying that more complexity and duration of witnesses is needed, like for example in a complicated technical case?)
I read about the judicial system being swamped, but are judges using time limits to help move things along better?
In: 2116
In federal civil cases the judge gives each side a specific amount of time, say 12 hours, and you use it as you please but if you run out, you’re done. Like a chess clock.
The parties submit requests for the amount of time they think they need, and the judge cuts it waaay back. You end up cutting out witnesses and evidence just to stay within the time allotted.
The judge can game it as you suggest but more importantly, one side’s case is often quite simple while the opponent’s is nuanced and complex. 50-50 favors the simple.
>Seems like this must be a very judge-dependent and judge-controlled thing?
Not really. There’s a phase before the trial begins called ‘discovery’, where the attorneys make a list of the evidence and witenesses they intend to show to the jury. As others in this thread have pointed out, the dramatic trope of the [surprise witness](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SurpriseWitness) is completely not allowed, and can cause a mistrail, and often results in disciplinary actions for the lawyer who fails to disclose all the evidence in the case.
Getting back to your question, the judge examines the evidence that each litigant / counsel wants to present, and budgets sufficient time for it to be shown. But, there are rules as to what kinds of evidence is admissible and pertinent, and a lawyer will waste the court’s time at his client’s peril, as well as his own.
In a completely different legal system, but I’ve been present for a large number of criminal cases here in Norway. Sometimes as a witness, but usually to guard the accused during the proceedings.
I have noticed a discrepancy between defense lawyers who are well liked and trusted by their clients, and ones who are actually effective at getting their clients a shorter sentence.
The lawyers who talk a lot in court, droning on and on until everyone has lost track of what their point is, and who argue about everything even when guilt is obvious, tend not to get great results. But their clients, being generally of less than average intelligence, think their lawyer is great since he worked so hard for them.
By contrast, I have observed some lawyers who prefer to not waste time on the obvious. They will instead pick one or two points where the facts might be uncertain, or where there may be reason for leniency if seen in a certain light, and put all their efforts into that. Like surgically applying leverage where it matters, rather than attempting a sort of legal carpet bombing. Their arguments are typically short but effective and to the point, so the court is able to keep it all in mind without getting derailed along the way. These lawyers are, in my experience, much more effective but also less well liked by criminal clients who think they’re slacking off and not arguing enough.
In Canada:
It’s generally something estimated based on complexity, and how many witnesses (expert and non-expert) are going to be called by both sides.
They tend to be chosen in 1 week (5 day) blocks. So you decide between 1 – 4 weeks for most trials. Anything more than 4 weeks would likely already have a Judge involved as a Case Management Judge, and that Judge helps pick the length.
Lawyers from both sides discuss how long they think the trial needs to take. They usually agree on a length and then request the trial length with the Court directly. For most regular trials, Judges are often not involved in selecting the length.
During the Trial, Judges can grant more time if needed.
TL;DR How much money you got?
The judge doesn’t directly set a length for a trial, by saying “this trial will take 10 days” or something like that. The length of a trial depends on how complex the case is. If you have a case about a car crash where one driver is going to testify that the light was red and one driver is going to say it was green, that probably won’t take very long. If you have a financial case where the evidence includes thousands of pages of bank records, and accountants need to testify about what the records mean, that can take a very long time.
The judge influences the length of the trial by ruling on what evidence comes in. Usually, these rulings depend on whether the evidence violates some legal rule meant to ensure reliability. But the judge can also exclude evidence that isn’t very important compared to how much time it would take up, just to speed up the trial and keep it efficient. In federal court, the rule of evidence for this is Rule 403, which allows a judge to exclude evidence based on “undue delay, wasting time, or needlessly presenting cumulative evidence.” A judge can definitely favor one side or the other with these rulings, and the side being ruled against often feels like that’s what’s happening!
Most of the rulings are sorted out before trial, so by the time trial starts everyone has a general idea how many witnesses will testify and how long their testimony will take. The judge and lawyers give a “time estimate,” but it is not a hard limit. The trial will go as long as it takes to finish.
During trial, the judge can also control the courtroom proceedings and can stop questioning of a witness or argument by a lawyer, if it’s getting repetitive and is no longer productive. But judges generally let the lawyers ask as many questions or argue as long as they want, since the wrong ruling might get the case thrown out on appeal. The lawyers are also trying to persuade the jury, not bore them to death, so they have their own incentive to get to the point.
Also, the time estimates are frequently wrong. Trials are chaotic and unpredictable. Another commenter said that trials are “scripted” and there are no surprise witnesses. I disagree. It’s true that you don’t see some important, star witness burst through the doors like on TV. But crazy stuff happens all the time. Witnesses change their testimony or may not show up at all. New evidence might be discovered in the middle of trial. Testimony that was expected to take 20 minutes might take two days, because the witness is difficult or the lawyers have some point to make. And so on. A trial involves many moving parts, including multiple human beings with conflicting goals and personalities, so no one person is in total control.
Source: am a trial lawyer.
In England/Wales it’s generally agreed between the parties – “we think this will take x days to be heard”. If they are in agreement then in the general run of things then the Court will list it for that long.
The judge can have a view of course, and may offer some input at reviews among the way if they think the estimate is wildly out. But that’s rare – generally the solicitors and barristers have a good handle on how long it’s likely to run and the Court let themselves be guided by that.
In the run up to the trial you literally produce a timetable – first half day is reading time for the judge, then opening submissions that afternoon, then day 2 and 3 are claimant witnesses, day 4 and 5 are respondent witnesses, day 6 is the single joint expert etc etc. The sides each also provide a skeleton argument to the judge (a very brief explanation of the legal position they’ll be taking) along with a list of cases they’ll be relying on and why). The whole purpose is to hit the ground running once the case gets under way and to spend as little time in court as possible.
You don’t want the case to run longer then necessary for several reasons.
Firstly trial is expensive – the large bulk of a case’s legal costs comes in that final week or so. So it’s not in the client’s interest. As a rule of thumb, for a 2 year case costing 50k, I would expect 20-25k of that to come in the final 3 weeks.
Secondly – Judges will also have very little patience with anyone trying to spin out a hearing unnecessarily. Not only does that set the Court against you, but it also can impact the costs you can recover at the end if you win. If you’ve been a tool and wasted everyone’s time then you can expect your costs recovery to be severely limited as punishment.
Thirdly, often there aren’t actually lots of issues in dispute. Judges and decent lawyers are very good at cutting through the extraneous stuff and getting to the nub of it. I’ve seen people (generally people acting for themselves) get absolutely lost in the details and judges have very little patience for it. You can expect to be shut down very quickly.
Also – by the time you get into Court you have had a couple of years to work over everything in detail and to identify exactly what is accepted and what isn’t. The court room is not a place generally where fresh stuff comes to light – normally it’s two sides saying “we have identified that we disagree on this issue – here’s the evidence in support of each parties position, can you make the call please?”.
Edit – this applies to England/Wales civil stuff, no idea how it’s done elsewhere!
Am a lawyer and I can answer this!
>Seems like this must be a very judge-dependent and judge-controlled thing?
Not really, though the judge does have some input.
>I imagine lawyers must want to try to throw in the kitchen sink and have tons and tons of witnesses going down every rabbit hole, but the judge has to say no to some things.
There is actually a rule of evidence that forbids too much repetitive stuff. If you can make your argument with three witnesses, you don’t get to bring in 20 to all say the same thing. And lawyers don’t want to do that, either: very few lawyers actually enjoy trials and would much rather spend as little time as possible making their point.
>Do they set a time limit based on the complexity of the topic? Do they make a gut feel call about whether any particular witness actually adds new information and say “that’s enough”?
What typically happens is that well before the trial, both sides prepare a witness list and submit it to the court. You don’t need to use everyone on your list (you might have ten people and only use two), but you usually can’t call people who aren’t on your list.
When setting the case for trial, often the judge will ask how many hours or days each witness might need. And the lawyers do a rough estimate, like “I’m only planning on asking an hour’s worth of questions” or “this witness has a lot of info, I may need the whole day.” This is mostly based on their knowledge of what kind of stuff they want out of the witness and what kind of questions they’re going to need to get there. They also know their witnesses’ schedules: they don’t want to make their witness miss weeks of work when they can say what date they need them specifically instead.
Murder trials, needing way more evidence, tend to take weeks because each side is fielding and/or cross-examining witnesses, and you need more information to find someone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. A civil trial can take only a day, depending on what it is.
Just as a fun thing: in the Alex Jones defamation trial in Connecticut, the plaintiffs set aside several days to make their case. At one point, they’d prepared for Alex Jones to potentially testify, and so had set aside several hours to devote to that. Alex Jones ended up not showing up, but they’d told their witnesses “we don’t need you today because we’re handling this guy,” so they just canceled the trial for the day and restarted the next day as if they’d spent the whole prior day in testimony.
The same thing happened with Nikolaus Cruz’s murder trial. The defense had estimated that they’d need days for a lot of witnesses, and then didn’t call most of them. The judge got upset because, though they’re not required to call every witness, they had asked for a lot of time to be set aside only to not use it, which was inconvenient to everyone else involved who maybe had taken off work for trial date weeks in the future, not realizing that their turn would come much earlier.
>Can the judge “game” this and favor one side (intentionally or unintentionally if they don’t believe the side saying that more complexity and duration of witnesses is needed, like for example in a complicated technical case?)
Not really. If a lawyer makes an objection (like “objection, asked and answered” or “objection, repetitive”), the judge can say to the other side, “Counsel, you can move on” or “Counsel, do you have anything else for your client to say?” which are both signs to drop that line of question and either call someone else or move on to another topic.
>I read about the judicial system being swamped, but are judges using time limits to help move things along better?
Not really, since the issue with court backlog is less about not having the time and more like trying to schedule a D&D night that works for all the adults in your friend group. Lawyers with other cases or commitments may not find a date that works for everyone until they start planning months in advance.
There’s also backlog from cases coming in. Remember that a lot of court procedural stuff needs to happen extremely quickly and without warning (like calling in a warrant). So a certain amount of time every day needs to be dedicated to handling that, not just scheduled things.
I’m a former criminal defense attorney that has tried complex cases that lasted over a month with jury pools in the hundreds. There’s a few things to know:
1) Jurors sit and watch all day. That’s what they do. Just sit on a chair and watch people talk for 8 hours a day. Ive seen them fall asleep, I had an old granny knit an entire sweater while paying better attention to the entire testimony than any juror I’ve ever had.
A jury finding CANNOT be overturned for ‘making the wrong decision.’ A Jury has a near absolute right to find someone guilty or not for any reason.
As a result attorneys DO NOT throw everything. You have to make a point and keep the jurors’ interest for very long periods of time. Any attorney worth their salt very carefully plans testimony to keep the jury’s interest and create drama in what is an exceptionally boring circumstance. You pick a theory and never do the spaghetti against the wall–any other facts that may affect an appellate record can be entered into the record through other hearings.
You have nearly zero right to say the jury was wrong.
2) trials are not like on TV. Most States require some, if not a lot of, disclosure. Witnesses are typically made available to interview beforehand, evidence is provided to both parties long before trial. You don’t get surprise witnesses and random stuff popping up very often. As a result any experienced attorney can pretty confidently say “I have about 30 minutes of questions to ask this witness,” opponent can confidently say “I have fifteen,” judge will say ‘make it an hour’ and you’re usually good.
There are very few possibilities for a “surprise witness.” It happens, but it makes you look really bad if you, as an attorney, don’t know you could possibly need a witness. So what you do is give the judge a list of everyone you may need, say ‘I probably won’t need this person,’ a d then go from there. You can end up in EXTREMELY deep shit if you call a witness neither judge nor opponent knows about without a very very very good reason.
3) trials are scheduled by the week. A courtroom usually handles very quick scheduling things in the mornings, and motions on a particular day. In my jurisdiction court started at 9 am everyday, Monday was scheduled for legal motions, and every judge had Tuesday to Friday from 1030am to end-of-day set for trial. If you had a one day trial the whole week was scheduled, if you had a five day trial then Tuesday through Friday one week and Tuesday through Friday the next week was scheduled for that trial. There was lots of extra time if needed.
4) those objections you see on TV (like “relevance”) are real things. Witnesses don’t get to just talk forever, opposing counsel and the Judge will shut things down if someone just starts rambling. One of my very first trials involved a witness who had maybe 5 minutes of barely relevant testimony and couldn’t for her life shut the fuck up–judge happily locked her off the roster because dealing with her was just too much to deal with for very little purpose (and keeping in mind number 1 attorneys will often just agree on a fact and have the judge state ‘this fact is not being debated’ precisely to avoid ridiculous and boring testimony).
5) the burden for a criminal trial is “Beyond a reasonable doubt”–best described as there’s no other explanation but that defendant did this. Any alternative explanation means a not guilty. That’s a very high burden. If the prosecution doesn’t have a very clear idea of what happened and when the trial doesn’t happen.
**IN SHORT** trials are like Broadway plays–sure an actor may take 10 minutes to deliver a line that should take 2 but both sides want to keep people’s attention and everybody knows what the script is going to be by that point. There are tools for keeping irrelevant information out, but both sides go in with a pretty clear idea of how the story is going to unfold and judges afford plenty of time to make that happen, while also keeping control of unnecessary information.
I believe each side gets to ask for the “time they need” to present their case. And they can argue that what the other side is asking for is unreasonable. So the judge has to rule on all that, just like anything else that the judge has to rule on when there is disagreement over procedure, etc. But no judge is going to sit and listen to either side saying the same thing over and over and over, and no judge is going to sit and listen to either side saying nothing. And do judges favor one side or another unfairly sometimes? Sure. Basically any time a case is successfully appealed, it is because one side was favored in a way that a judge probably could have remedied if they had chosen to do so.
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