State of the Judiciary Address

Thank you and good morning, everyone. I’m particularly excited for us to be in this unique venue. I know this is the first time the Borgata has scheduled the State of the Judiciary’s Address for here. Is was really nice to see it on the Marquis driving into Atlantic City. It’s a sellout exciting event.

From here it certainly looks as though you have wonderfully comfortable seats. I will tell you that what we see are blinding stage lights that are coming into our eyes. And I’m going to follow your advice and use the Teleprompters. The problem with that is it’s not keyed up for anything that I was intending to say. And all I can see are the first three sentences of the speech that you’ll hear sometime soon, so this will be a very, very short set of remarks, which probably wouldn’t be that bad.

Alan, congratulations to you on your installation last night. We look forward to working together this year on many things. Judge Brown, colleagues in the Judiciary and on the Bar, I’m pleased to be here again to report on the State of the Judiciary. It is a challenging time. I wish that I could echo the tone of Judge Brown’s remarks at the end there, but it is a challenging time in our nation and our state and we see that reflected in our court system.

I’ll go light on statistics, but I’ll mention just a few. In 2009 we project the highest number of filings by the end of this court term at the end of next month, 1.15 million case filings in our Superior Court. And those increased filings are fueled by the state of our economy, the staggering number of mortgage foreclosure cases that we have seen, a historic high in the number of contract and collection cases that are tied to credit card debt and other related matters.

And we’re responding to those filings with the smallest number of staff in recent memory in the history of the Judiciary. In order to meet our budget shortfall last year we have 300 fewer staff members as a result of the early buyout and attrition.

Thanks to some careful management efforts as well as the exemplary dedication of our judges and staff -- and many of our judges are here today and I thank you for that -- we have had the same responsiveness in handling cases, the same high caliber decision making and the same commitment to excellence in the administration of justice, and that’s a tribute to our judges who deal with difficult issues day in and day out under an ever growing caseload and to our staff who care so passionately about the work that they do.

I thank all of them for their extraordinary effort this past year and for the challenges that lie ahead in the coming year.

It is no secret that our state faces a fiscal crisis of great proportion right now and the Judiciary has not gone unscathed during that. Last year we were asked to meet a shortfall of $27 million, which we met as I mentioned through a reduction in force of 300 and by deferring IT, Information Technology, expenses as well as some other items.

That was the opposite direction of where we wanted to head given what the Judiciary must do, but we had no choice.

This coming year as it stands right now we face a budget shortfall of $52 million. And once again, I expect we will have a reduction in staff. We estimate that next year we’ll have 170 fewer staff members and that reluctantly once again we will have to defer IT expenses and also make adjustments to salary lines, operating expenses and a number of other areas.

Judge Grant and his talented leadership and his team are hard at work on budget issues and we’re convening a group of judges and staff to try to identify, to explore additional areas for cuts that will not impair our mission. It is a difficult process. It is a sober challenge. And as we focus on both short term fiscal needs we must keep in mind the long term obligations that the Judiciary has to serve the public.

I’m confident that we will come through this challenging year ahead strongly. We’ll absorb the loss of additional personnel and still be able to meet the needs of litigants and needs of the public.

But I worry about the future if our economy is to falter because we cannot continue to lose more than a hundred people each year and be able to provide the essential services in the professional manner that we have been able to do so which the public rightly demands of us.

At some point the strain will be too much to bear. And we can’t tell people with emergencies in our Family Court system that they should come back another day or that potential victims of domestic violence can’t have their matters heard

because our resources are stretched thin or that defendants can’t have hearings or bail set until next week, that law enforcement should wait because the search warrant that they need responded to right away doesn’t have enough staff or judicial resources to attend to it then, nor can we tell corporations and ordinary citizens embroiled in civil disputes on which their very livelihoods depend that they should come back in a few more months when we will have more staffing.

All of these matters depend not only on a fair and independent Judiciary, but one with the resources to be able to respond to the crises that are upon us each day, and that’s dependent on the professional dedicated staff that we pride ourselves on having been able to work with.

We appreciate the respect that the Executive and the Legislative Branches have shown to us as an independent branch of government in being able to identify cost savings ourselves. We’ll continue to cooperate as best we can in order to help meet the shortfall that our state government faces at this moment and as we do so we all are hopeful that we’ll get through this immediate crisis mindful of the long term responsibilities that the Judiciary has.

As we work through these issues our judges and our staff are most fortunate to have a healthy productive relationship with the Bar at the county and state levels. It’s a relationship borne of mutual respect and a shared sense of responsibility. Let’s talk briefly about some efforts that that partnership has worked through this past year and some of those results on some of the meaningful and timely programs that we have together worked on. The first is an initiative that I’m sure man of you are familiar with relating to the mortgage foreclosure crisis.

That crisis has received wide attention nationwide and the stark numbers of our filings in New Jersey tell the story unfortunately. For the ten year period beginning in 1995 our filings averaged roughly 20,000 mortgage foreclosure cases a year. This year we estimate by the end of next month we will have about 58,000 mortgage foreclosure filings.

And those aren’t just numbers. Each case represents the potential for real human suffering, the potential for losing one’s home. The Judiciary working closely with the Executive and the Legislative Branches has implemented a statewide mediation program with a very simple goal at the heart of it, getting borrowers and lenders to sit down together at the table to try to work out their differences and forge an agreement that will avoid the foreclosure.

The court’s obligation in all instances is to provide a neutral forum, one that will protect the rights of both lenders and homeowners. But in time of crisis courts have the obligation beyond that, to attempt to provide a forum where there can be meaningful, professional and free opportunities to foster compromise. And with that in mind today in each and every foreclosure action that is filed in our state homeowners, lenders have the opportunity for mediation.

In our contested cases, which is but a small number of the overall cases that are filed, at the case management conference our judges are ordering mediation. In uncontested cases homeowners receive not one, not two, but three notices encouraging them to participate in the mediation program. And to try to insure that this mediation session is a valuable one the Executive and Legislative Branches have provided for housing counselors to work with homeowners in advance of a session, and of course we’re dependent on professional, trained, competent mediators.

This began as a pilot project in Middlesex County. Last November when we announced that we would roll it out statewide the very first thing that we did was went to the legal community and asked lawyers if they would volunteer their time, their services, to help serve as mediators. And in the weeks and months that followed more than 750 lawyers volunteered to do just that. All of them had been trained by the AOC at more than a dozen sessions lasting either one or three days, and that’s a tribute to the professionalism at the AOC.

Let’s talk a little bit about the results to date. In the first four months of this year from January to April we’ve had 548 mediation sessions scheduled, 202 completed, and of those 100 cases were settled. That’s 100 cases where there were loan modifications or reductions in interest rates or extension or forbearance agreements or some other form of resolution, and those are very impressive results.

Equally remarkable is the statement of support by members of the Bar, by members of the legal community, stepping forward to offer assistance in the noblest tradition of our profession and by doing so making a real difference in the lives of many people, which is why we entered the profession of law. We applaud all of those.

Now this past year the Judiciary has also worked on an initiative relating to our veterans who find themselves in the criminal justice system. More than 4,000 citizen soldiers of the New Jersey National Guard have been summoned for duty overseas. We know historically that some veterans have problems readjusting to civilian life on their return, may end up in trouble with the law, and that some of those offenses may have as an underlying cause substance abuse problems, mental health issues and related areas of concern.

In anticipation of the large number of veterans who will be returning in the next 12 months, we’ve piloted a project in Atlantic and in Union Counties. It’s designed to identify veterans who find themselves in municipal and superior court in criminal cases and refer them for existing services that agencies are currently providing.

A key component of he project is the participation of DMVA, the Department of Military and Veteran Affairs, which is identifying mentors, veterans and retirees, who can sit

and talk and offer guidance to those defendants in these criminal cases and speak to them perhaps in ways that our probation officers and judges aren’t able to reach them to be sure this is a program about identifying and referring defendants for services, it’s not a veteran’s court or a diversionary program or a substitute for criminal prosecution.

And as part of the process to date we have referred more than 80 veterans, 60 in Atlantic, more than 20 in Union County. And our goal, our hope is that these referrals and that this mentoring process will help make an improvement in the lives for these individual defendants and that we will not see them in the criminal justice system a second time.

One other challenge that we’re working on that we spoke about last year is the expansion of the electronic filing system in our state’s Judiciary. We must continue to modernize the way that we operate and to take advantage of changes in technology not only to make our courts more accessible to litigants and the public and more efficient, but to anticipate the next generation of lawyers for whom those long yellow legal pads will be a historic fiction and for whom Twittering and texting, let alone the internet, and computers is a thing of reality.

We have a special committee at work right now that’s chaired by former Attorney General John Degnan working with a group of practitioners, judges, staff, people with technical expertise, and they’re analyzing a host of practical questions about where and how to expand and how to do so at a time of tremendous budget cuts. I look forward to getting their report and recommendations in the next weeks or perhaps months and acting upon them as we must.

This coming year will also be a year of change in part for some in our Appellate Division as we mark a return to Newark. The Appellate Division had a long rich history in Newark with chambers located there from the 1950s into the 1980s. And Newark of course remains one of the principal legal centers in our state with more than 2,000 private practitioners, some of our major law firms, the largest county prosecutor’s officer and so on.

Add to the mix that Essex County has made a priority the improvement of the courthouse complex there with the renovation of the historical courthouse, a new jury assembly room, parking garage, park, plaza. So when County Executive Joseph Divincenzo offered the following proposal, beautiful, newly outfitted space that would be dedicated to our Appellate Division, more space than currently exists in the Hackensack and Springfield chambers whose leases will expire at an overall less cost and a newly refurbished courtroom dedicated to the Appellate Division in the adjacent courthouse building, that idea has grown into a construction plan that is currently underway. And we

hope that by early 2010 or early next year our Appellate Division judges will be operating out of the new chambers there and continuing to serve litigants and lawyers with the excellence that our Appellate Division is so widely known for.

Finally, let me offer a word of thanks to Judge Glenn Grant. He’s completing his first year as Director of the Administrative Office of the Courts. He was off to a running start with energy, purpose, vision and a keen understanding of how the roles of judges and staff and members of our legal community, members of the bar, are all critical to the proper functioning of our courts. We’re grateful that he was willing to take on this assignment and look forward to working together with his leadership for many years to come.

Particularly at this challenging time Judge Grant and I welcome suggestions, comments, constructive criticism, ideas from the Judiciary and from the public and members of the Bar at large. The best way to reach me and Judge Grant and your assignment judges, certainly for me, is to do so by e-mail. Feel free to use it in order to continue this conversation. I welcome that.

I thank you for offering me the opportunity to speak with you this morning and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.

Thank you, everyone.