Court-case backlog is cause for concern

Utah's courts are in need of a little spring cleaning, according to a state audit released Monday on the growing backlog of pending civil suits in Utah's court system.

The audit, presented to lawmakers during the Legislative Audit Subcommittee, shows that the court's case file database contains thousands of civil filings that have either been abandoned by parties or have sat in limbo for two years or more. On the other side, the audit identified many active civil suits that are not on the state court's list of active cases. Civil suits included legal actions on contracts, debt collections, torts and property rights.

Audit supervisor Leslie Marks said most of those forgotten cases are actions that have been dropped by filing attorneys and no motions to dismiss were ever filed.

The result, Marks told lawmakers, is the initial data indicates a backlog of civil files that paints a darker picture than actually exists.

The main cause for the courts looking worse than they are appears to be a lack of sufficient data management, according to the audit. In actuality, 87 percent of major civil cases filed in Utah are disposed of within one year. The national standard set by the American Bar Association is 90 percent.

"We did find some errors in programming," Marks said. The audit also found that court clerks are forced to manually input case information into the computer because they "don't trust" the court's software to create the record accurately, Marks noted.

Auditors noted the result is a database that clerks have to wade through to locate active cases. The data also skews the actual caseload figures for Utah judges.

District Judge Thomas Willmore, chairman of the District Court Judges Association, said the courts are already working to remove thousands of "deadwood" cases from the database. "We can do better at getting these cases kicked out," he said.

However, Willmore said the reality is that Utah's justice system is one of the best in the nation in terms of quickly handling civil suits. "Our system here in Utah is quite frankly the envy of other systems," Willmore said.

District Court Administrator Mark Jones said Utah ranks in the top 10 percent in the nation for how quickly it handles court cases.