"Swift " Legal Action - Hardly

Speedy trials exist only for criminals.  There, I said it, and boy do I feel better.  My clients?  Not so much.  The reason speedy trials exist for criminal matters is that if you're going to deprive someone of their freedom, and possibly do that pending trial, then you need to get on with it. That way, if the person's found not guilty, they can get on with their lives, and if they are, well we get them off the street faster.  I know, in the Trenches, clients feel like they're going through the same thing, but the law draws a distinction between emotional and financial prison and literal incarceration.  What that means here in the Trenches is that justice is not swift, at least not how you would define it.  Those of us who toil here are thrilled that the State requires that family law cases be completed within a year of filing them - this is such a change from how it used to be, when you could be lucky to finish a case in eighteen months to two years.  To our clients, this year seems like an eternity; they feel like they're sentenced to live in legal purgatory as the wheels of justice grind slowly forward.  The glacial speed of litigation is one reason we urge clients to use alternate methods to resolve their disputes - mediation, collaboration, negotiation.  These methods may not be speedy, but in most cases, they're faster than going to trial.  They have the added advantage of allowing the parties to craft their own results rather than have someone decide what happens to them.  Clients, however, don't understand all this and they imagine that trial would be faster and fairer.  It's not, but they don't know the truth.  It's up to us to teach them.  Here in the Trenches.