(CN) — Open for business or closed like it’s Sunday: the divergent ways in which San Francisco and San Diego courts have dealt with the pandemic can perhaps best be encapsulated in the clashing positions taken by their leaders.
“One of the first questions I’m always asked is whether we’re closed. And I’m going to tell you, ‘We are open for business,’” Presiding Judge Garrett Wong told San Francisco lawyers over a video call last month.
“San Francisco Superior Court is doing it,” said the judge, “working the court with limited resources, staff, and personnel, but we’re committed to our duty to providing the essential services that the public must rely upon to maintain public safety and emergency relief.”
A week later San Diego’s Presiding Judge Lorna Alksne had a completely different message for the local bar association.
“We are closed. We are closed like a Sunday every day. We’re only doing essential services and emergency services,” she said. "I know there’s a lot of talk around the state that ‘this court is doing this, and this court is doing that, and why aren’t you doing it like this court?’ Every court is differently situated.”
Many courts in California sent their employees home on March 17th without a scheduled return. But San Francisco Superior kept its doors open whereas anyone approaching the entrance to San Diego Superior was met by a phalanx of security officials preventing entry.
California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye empowered the 58 individual superior courts to take other unprecedented actions to avoid becoming vectors for the coronavirus. Those actions included prioritizing criminal matters, extending timelines in criminal and civil cases, and conducting hearings by phone and video whenever possible.
The Judicial Council approved the emergency measures at a meeting in late March. The technology committee chair, Justice Marsha Slough, said the extensions were not carte blanche for courts to be closed.
"The trial courts need as best they can to open to provide relief, to function not as shuttered business offices but rather function as true beacons of justice during real times of crisis,” she said.
Cantil-Sakauye shared Slough’s opinion. “I concur,” she said. “We are courts, and we are open in crisis.”
‘Open for Business’
San Francisco responded by keeping 25 percent of its courtrooms open and extending deadlines for filing discovery responses and motions in civil cases. Criminal arraignments and bail hearings are being handled by video, and the court started holding preliminary criminal hearings two weeks ago.
The court never stopped docketing its new civil filings. New cases and other filings were delivered in paper form through a drop box near the court’s entrance and could also be sent electronically. And those filings have been docketed and made public.
Wong, the presiding judge, is currently conducting civil hearings on his law and motion calendar through the telephonic system CourtCall. “I’m handling everything remotely,” Wong said.
Scott Lawson, a partner at the San Francisco employment law firm Lawson + Lawson LLP, said the court seems to have deftly pivoted its operations in the wake of an unprecedented pandemic.
“To me it’s an astonishingly complex set of challenges that they’re facing and I think their response has been very rapid as each of these orders comes down. They’ve not wasted any time,” Lawson said, adding that so far he’s not felt stymied by the closure, though trial dates have been vacated and deadlines pushed back.
“I think the court has done a good job of responding to this super complicated crisis but there are things that are inherent in the Covid-19 problem that create impediments to normal litigation,” he said. “The court has been open to various ways of making it easier for people to practice.”
Follow @MariaDinzeo
