Baby Veronica

As you all may have read in the news today, Baby Veronica was reunited with her adoptive parents and has left the state of Oklahoma (finally!) to head home to South Carolina.  The case is over and everyone can move on with their lives.  Swift justice indeed - it took only 3 or so years for the case to work its way from original adoption, to the U.S. Supreme Court  and back again to South Carolina, to an Oklahoma Court that stayed enforcement of the South Carolina order, to the birth father being charged criminally, and finally to the stay lifting and Veronica heading home. In the Trenches, that really is pretty fast.  Lots of lawyers (including some of my friends here in the Trenches) worked very hard to make that happen.  Good work!
When clients ask how long a case can take, I try to tell them that the only way you can predict the length of a case is to stay out of court.  When you mediate, collaborate or negotiate, you can control the pace of the settlement of the case, you can control how much time to spend on what, how much importance to give to facts and issues, and most importantly, when to compromise and move on.  Otherwise, the court determines how much time the case takes, at least initially. Someone is usually disappointed.  How disappointed they are determines whether they take an appeal.  If the judge did make a mistake, you come back to the trial court and do it again.  That's called a remand.  Maybe there's another appeal after a remand.  We can do this over and over again, and some people do.   Oh, and did I mention that you probably won't get that initial trial date until somewhere 6 to 7 months down the road, an appeal takes 9 months to a year,  and then you go down and start all over again.  Cases on remand from an appeal don't get to cut the line, so they get set in as if they were just filed.  And on it goes.  Which way would you like to spend years of your life - in court or moving on?  Here in the Trenches.