Speed has not always been a hallmark of the Minnesota family court system, where cases are backlogged and judges are swamped, but a new program might be the Drano the clogged pipeline needs.
Minnesota courts are experimenting with “a fundamentally different sort of dispute resolution,” says Tanja Manrique, presiding judge for the 4th Judicial District Family Court, in Hennepin County, which sees 10,000 new family law cases each year. The process is called the Moderated Settlement Conference Program, which was designed by the local chapter of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers to help courts resolve the most difficult, longest-pending divorce cases on their dockets.
The 4th District tried it last April and May and here’s how it worked. Twenty blue-chip Minnesota family law attorneys showed up to volunteer as moderators on 36 judge-referred, high-conflict divorce cases. “These were the hardest, most complex cases, which probably would have required two days of trial,” Manrique says. A judge was standing by to make the outcome official if one could be reached.
A lot of them were. Seventy-five percent of the 36 cases were settled that very day, and most of the others were at least inched forward.
Manrique credits the success to the program’s structure. Unlike typical mediation, judges and moderators are able to weigh in on the cases, telling parties who had a good argument, who didn’t, and what would be the likely outcome at a trial.
“Our professional opinions on the cases encourage people to listen to reality,” says Andrea Niemi of Niemi, Jerabek & Kretchmer, who moderated five cases during the program.
With the Moderated Settlement Conference Program’s success, court-sponsored alternative dispute resolution programs could become a popular judicial strategy.
The 4th District family court already has others in place, including Social and Financial Early Neutral Evaluations, in-house settlement programs and a Spanish-language settlement calendar.
“Those kinds of programs are the only way the court system is going to be able to manage the volume we have on a timely basis,” Manrique says. “Our family bar can always be counted on to help us establish new programs at an affordable cost to citizens.”
(Washington and Ramsey counties have also successfully experimented with the program.)
With the program’s success in family court, Manrique suggests that civil cases may be next because “the programs deliver a qualitatively enhanced experience for citizens who have to come to the court.”
When it comes to unclogging courts, the program may turn out to be legal Drano.
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