Happy 100th, Judicial Council. Now about that $500M...

The state judiciary's collegial façade cracked a bit this month when the Judicial Council celebrated its 100th anniversary--and a few judges said not so fast.

Every institution toots its horn and camouflages its blemishes. Reading the self-congratulatory prose produced by lawmakers and judicial branch honchos for this birthday party caused some to recall what was omitted at the fiesta.

 There was no mention of the black hole into which the Judicial Council's staff arm, the Administrative Office of the Courts, disappeared--its name erased in 2014 along with some unhappy history.

 The AOC's leaders, then-Chief Justice Ronald M. George and Administrative Director William C. Vickrey, both of whom retired in 2011, were the drivers of an extraordinary boondoggle: the failed installation of a courtwide computer network known as the Court Case Management System. 

Its decade-long attempted implementation spiraled out of control, threatening to bankrupt the third branch with a projected completion cost of $1.9 billion.

After George and Vickrey retired, Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye pulled the plug on CCMS in 2012. In a 2016 Daily Journal interview, she said she wished she'd done it sooner. She could not be reached this week for further comment.

The Judicial Council quietly retired the AOC name in a crisis rebranding effort after years of controversy over perceived mismanagement, budget woes, spending excesses and a mutiny by a black-robed posse that launched the breakaway Alliance of California Judges. 

Like the CCMS episode, that reform group also goes unmentioned in official Judicial Council anniversary reports.

To explain the erasure of the Administrative Office of the Courts, the Judicial Council published Rule 10.81. It noted there had been a "common misperception" that the AOC was a separate independent policymaking entity. That confusion, the note added, "impeded the council's ability to advance the interests of the judicial branch."

Behind the opaque prose was a very clear power struggle between the Alliance's trial court judges who believed in a decentralized system and the Judicial Council's evident urge to consolidate the business of the courts via its computer web.
 
Today, the Alliance's leaders have mostly paused their defiant activities. Their largely dormant website contains only news of an ongoing class action they endorse over allegations that the judiciary is underpaid. The lead plaintiff is Maryanne G. Gilliard, an Alliance member now retired from the Sacramento County Superior Court. She declined to comment for this article. Gilliard et al. v. California Department of Human Resources et al., 24STCP02837 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed Sept. 3, 2024).

Alliance leaders are disinclined to participate in the 100th anniversary hoopla. They believe they won their original battle against what they called Judicial Council overreach.

"We formed for one reason," the Alliance's president, Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Stephen W. "Steve" White, said this week, "to oppose the overweening desire of Chief Justice Ron George to centralize control of the Superior Courts under his authority." 

The computer network was key, White said. "The CCMS was the centerpiece of his ambition to put everything under control of the AOC. I'd describe it as a dark-of-night quest to yank the trial courts' power and centralize the management of cases in the Judicial Council."

White said that in the summer of 2009 he learned that the AOC had quietly, without notice to the courts or authorization from the Judicial Council, proposed budget trailer-bill language empowering the chief justice to name the presiding judges of the state's trial courts.

"This was an astounding effort to hobble the trial courts and expand the chief justice's mandate," White said. "The Alliance caught them in the act and the effort failed."

 The Alliance of California Judges went to the Legislature's joint audit committee to press for a hard look at the CCMS program. "Chief Justice George was also physically present in the state Capitol that week, trying hard to prevent an audit," White said. "In the end, they wasted more than half a billion dollars."

Efforts to reach George for comment were unsuccessful. In his 2013 memoir "Chief: The Quest for Justice in California," he displayed humorous disdain for the Alliance's pushback, at one point comparing the group to the Flat Earth Society. 

He also said, "When I was asked by the press whether these malcontents were a major source of concern to me, I responded that if I were to let that happen it would be like canceling a trip to Yosemite because there were ants on the trail." 

Elsewhere in "Chief" he quoted "the philosopher possum Pogo, who made the famous pronouncement, 'We have met the enemy, and he is us.'"

 Regarding the CCMS project, George rebuked its critics: "Those judges who welcome any chance to lessen their accountability to the statewide administration of justice have taken advantage of the state's fiscal crisis, and of insufficient oversight by the A.O.C. in its management of the planned statewide information system, to urge that it be abandoned."

The Judicial Council's positive accomplishments over the years are doubtless worth applause, from setting up an agency to assess judicial candidates in the 1930s to writing Rules of Court in the 1940s. In the 1960s, what is now the Commission on Judicial Performance came along.

Over the next decades the council set standards for court interpreters, devised new rules for juvenile cases and won authority from lawmakers to allocate funds and reduce case delays. It studied gender bias in the courts and promoted access to justice. In the '80s it encouraged the provision of children's waiting rooms in courthouses. Next came jury system improvements. By 2001 the municipal and superior courts were unified.

It's a past that merits acclaim, but a lot of juice gets squeezed out of the official accounts.

"The council's first century tells a story of innovation, resilience, and public service," Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero said this month in a media release. "This year, we honor the council's legacy, celebrate those who have carried it forward, and reaffirm our commitment to ensuring equal access to justice for all."

Added Senator Pro Tem Monique Limón, as part of an Aug. 19 joint resolution by lawmakers recognizing the anniversary, "I am proud of the work the Judicial Council continues to accomplish and wish them another 100 years of success in defending our democracy."

To be sure. But unmentioned in the timeline supplied in Judicial Council media handouts are the stumbles and infighting over the CCMS debacle and the Alliance of California Judges' revolt. 

Those conflicts don't diminish the Judicial Council's worth, but they do display in full the challenges of running the largest judicial system in the U.S. 

There were trying times. The Great Recession forced the shuttering of 52 courthouses and more than 200 individual courtrooms statewide. Thousands of court employees lost their jobs, leading to chronic operational backlogs. Millions of Californians--especially in rural areas--lost local access to justice. Courthouse public counter hours were cut, and civil trials faced serious delays. 

While those belts squeezed tighter, the massive CCMS program lurched ever more deeply into the red as completion cost estimates, starting at $260 million and revised ever upwards, approached $2 billion. 

Launched by the Judicial Council in 2002, its aim was to replace more than 70 outdated local systems with a unified software platform to manage case scheduling for all matters and enable statewide e-filing and public record access.

In 2009, George told a restive audience of judges at a State of the Judiciary address in San Diego that it would be necessary to begin closing courts one day a month. That would stave off massive layoffs, he said, adding a request that judges pledge to reduce their salaries or donate a portion to the courts.

George acknowledged the controversy over the AOC's staff growth from 268 in 1998 to 887 in 2009 and said the budget crunch had hindered the CCMS program.

One judge noted a clash between ongoing capital expenditures and the call for penny-pinching. "Should we be building courthouses and putting in expensive computer systems into these courthouses, when we can't keep the ones open that we have?" asked San Diego County Superior Court Judge Daniel B. Goldstein in a 2009 Daily Journal article.

Comments like that fueled the Alliance's launch. "Twenty-seven of us judges got together and for the first time formed a group independent of the Judicial Council," said the Alliance's executive director, David R. Lampe. "We saw trial court funds being diverted to the CCMS program, so we went outside the system to coordinate with the Service Employees International Union over saving courthouse jobs."

Over the next few years, the Alliance grew to more than 600 members, about a third of the state's judges, Lampe said.

Lampe, then a trial judge in Bakersfield, now works at Signature Resolution. He explained that each trial court had long been its own constitutional body, a structure designed to keep the solution of local civil and criminal disputes within the community and its residents. 

"The Judicial Council had strayed from that fundamental decentralized court system," Lampe said. "When Chief Justice George brought state funding to the courts in 1997, judges feared the impact on local management. So, the Legislature told the Judicial Council to establish a Bill of Financial Management Rights for the trial courts, but it never happened. CCMS was a fiasco, and we worked hard to get an audit." 

In 2011, as the faltering CCMS rollout stalled, the Bureau of State Audits released a blistering assessment of its failure.

Court administrators had exercised "poor management" of the project, concealed its true projected $1.9 billion cost and misanalyzed the trial courts' real needs, the audit said.

Vickrey responded by announcing his agency would press forward with the project.

Backing Vickrey was Justice Terence L. Bruiniers of the 1st District Court of Appeal, who wrote in the Daily Journal--under the headline "New Technology Does More With Less"--"There have been repeated contentions that CCMS is a 'failure' and a waste of already scarce judicial branch resources," but "I am confident that we can demonstrate that those funds have been, and are being, well spent for the benefit of the public we serve."

Bruiniers did not respond to a request for further comment this week.

When Vickrey retired, he was widely seen as the fall guy for the CCMS flop, though he left with official accolades. He led an exit from the AOC that included several other officials, including the direct overseer of the CCMS project and the director of the executive office programs division. The courts' In Memoriam media release after his death in 2023 praised his nearly 20 years of service but did not mention CCMS.

 In March 2012, as budget constraints bit ever more deeply into court operations, the Legislature froze spending. The Judicial Council voted to scrap the statewide project. By then, about half a billion dollars had spiraled out of sight. The hearing to end CCMS was held at the William C. Vickrey Judicial Conference Center in the Ronald M. George State Office Complex.

Jon B. Eisenberg, a retired appellate attorney and frequent critic of the judiciary, said he thinks it's counterproductive for the judicial system to celebrate a 100th anniversary without mention of the difficult moments in its history. "The Judicial Council isn't likely to learn from its mistakes if it won't even acknowledge them," he said.