Over the past five years, the court has continued to focus on all stages of appellate case processing, making internal calendaring changes and adopting processing standards and measurements. The calendar management changes adopted by the court over the last decade have had a profoundly positive effect on the expeditious determination of appeals in Division I. Today, more than 75 percent of all appeals are decided in less than 18 months.
New Models
One trait that has been instrumental to the court's success in this area is the willingness of the judges to try different approaches and experiment with different calendaring models. While appellate courts traditionally have but four or five terms per year, Division I now has as many as eight.
The division historically had a monthly motion calendar where non-oral argument cases were set for consideration. Today, there is but one calendar for cases ready for consideration: the Judges' Calendar. There are seven terms of Judges' Calendars per year, 10 days per term. Each judge at Division I will author, on average, 10 opinions per term and co-author 20 others.
With this smaller case load per term, the time between terms when cases are not being argued and the "pre-conferencing" on cases by the panel the week before argument, the judges and their staffs are able to complete the decision-making and opinion-writing processes more quickly while enhancing the quality of their work. Indeed, this system is designed to give better focus and decision-making than before.
For example, with a faster process, fewer appeals are affected by new appellate decisions rendered after the trial court decision or appellate briefing was completed. The calendar cycle is aggressive and requires all participants in the system to know and comply with the Rules of Appellate Procedure to maximize its effectiveness.
Calendar Phases
The calendar management from the court's perspective is viewed in phases. The first phase is the time between filing the notice of appeal to the time the case is "record ready." This means that the clerk's papers and, if applicable, the verbatim report(s) of proceedings, have been filed and are complete.
The second phase runs from the "record ready" date to the filing of the appellant's brief. The time to the filing of the respondent's brief is the third phase. At this point, if there is no cross-appeal, the court considers the case "ready" for consideration. On cross-appeals, the case is "ready" when the second response brief is filed.
The fifth step in the process involves screening the case. When each case is deemed ready, the briefs are directed to a staff attorney for review. That staff attorney will recommend that a case be set for oral argument, no oral argument or court's motion on the merits. Approximately 60 percent of the appeals are set for oral argument.
Once the cases have been screened, they are set on the next available calendar. Ideally, the parties will receive at least 30 days' notice of the calendar date. If counsel are unavailable during a time when the case would otherwise be set, this could push a case back as far as 90 days.
Lawyers have the most impact on the time for completing their appeals during the first three phases when they are responsible for perfecting the appellate record and filing the briefs on the merits. The court actively supervises the timeframes for these phases to help keep them on track.
The Court of Appeals has two main recommendations for those lawyers representing clients in Division I: Comply with the record-perfection and briefing deadlines in the Rules of Appellate Procedure and get in sync with the court's calendar. The court's oral argument calendar, in addition to a host of additional helpful information, is available on Division I's portion of the court's Web site, www.courts.wa.gov.
