What’s the Fastest Court in America?
We've written before about the rules governing which cases get tried first, at least here in New York. While the state courts have priorities set by statute, short of giving your client a fatal illness (not recommended!) there are not a lot of surefire ways to cut to the front of the line. If there were, we'd be impaneling jurors and sweating out verdicts all day every day.
But while you cannot cut the line or force the court to move more quickly, you do sometimes have a say in which court hears your dispute. Forum shopping, that is, selectively picking which court will hear your case, has an ugly reputation. But it is a long-established feature of the common law. Indeed, forum shopping is so old as to feature prominently in the Magna Carta’s guarantee that the Court of Common Pleas be convened in a fixed location. This was necessary so that the barons could reliably access the Royal Court for their disputes rather than the patchwork system of overlapping local jurisdictions.
Obviously picking a court because of some unfair advantage or personal tie to the fact finder is unjust and potentially unethical. But even the most scrupulous practitioners should have few qualms about seeking justice in a forum more likely to dispense it quickly.
But where is that? What is the fastest court in America? And how does it move so quickly?
As is often the case across the panoply of jurisdictions it is hard to come to an answer with absolute certainty. But the federal courts report a variety of useful statistical data. Included within that data is the median time between filing and trial. This is helpfully broken out between civil and criminal trials, and between jury and non-jury trials.
As predominately civil trial lawyers, we will ignore the criminal numbers. As a practical matter, most criminal defendants don't get much of a say about where they're charged anyway. On the civil side, there is tremendous variation in the time it takes cases to reach trial. Across all civil cases for 2024, the Eastern District of Virginia, including Alexandria, Richmond, and most of the coastal part of the state, was the fastest court, with a median time to trial of just over a year – 14.6 months. On the other side of the country, the Eastern District of California, based in Sacramento and Fresno, was the slowest court with a median time to trial of over five years – 64.5 months.
This is a massive difference, one that could radically alter virtually every aspect of how litigation is analyzed. A fivefold increase in time to trial has massive implications for the costs of legal representation and the present value of future damages awards. It also has substantial implications for the viability and effectiveness of equitable relief. And on a personal level, a fivefold increase in time to trial has a huge psychological effect on the client. Litigation is only fun for lawyers (and not always fun even for them). But while a case that wraps up in a year represents an unpleasant couple of months, a case that takes six years is more like “a bad period of my life.”
This difference between fastest and slowest courts does not appear to be a fluke or odd statistical artifact. It appears in the 2023 data as well, where the Eastern District of California reported an even slower 68.3 median months to trial and the Eastern District of Virginia narrowly lost the fastest spot to the Northern District of Florida — but only by about two months (20.7 to 18.5). Nor are the districts radically different in trial volume, with the Eastern District of Virginia reporting 14 trials in 2023 to the Eastern District of California's 18. Both courts are somewhere in the middle in terms of size and nowhere close to the volume of the largest federal district court, the Los Angeles based Central District of California. That court tried 126 civil trials in 2024 with an average time to trial of just over 2 years (28.4 months). The Southern District of New York, where we often practice, comes in second in volume with 79 trials in 2024 and a median time to trial of 39.3 months. Just across the river, in the Brooklyn-based Eastern District of New York, things are about 10 months slower.
Why is the Eastern District of Virginia so fast? It has long had a reputation as a so-called “rocket docket” and has adopted rules and practices to protect its image as a court where justice moves swiftly. In particular, Eastern District of Virginia Local Rule 16(b) requires the court to expeditiously set deadlines at the very beginning of the case, including scheduling the final pretrial conference. With respect to discovery, these deadlines are generally very tight, in the range of 90 to 120 days.
There are some other local wrinkles on discovery practice as well. Depositions can be taken on 11 days’ notice and any objections to discovery requests are due within two weeks. If discovery is ordered by the court, there is a short 11-day compliance rule by default. The combination of these practices makes the completion of discovery an absolute mad dash, in contrast to other jurisdictions where it moves at a less manic pace.
While the federal court data is interesting, it is necessarily incomplete, as the overwhelming majority of civil cases are filed in the 50 state court systems. While the data available on the state courts has improved in recent years – providing a window into case volumes, subject matters, and settlement rates, the time to trial rates are not frequently reported. Some states report average time to disposition data, but this is of dubious significance as it includes cases thrown out on motions to dismiss or settled long before trial. It is a poor indicator of how long a case filed today will actually take to reach a jury.
Is it possible that there is a state court faster than the Eastern District of Virginia? I can't rule it out but would not bet on it. As courts of general jurisdiction, the state courts handle substantially higher volumes of cases than the federal courts and even the most diligent judges will struggle to move things as quickly.
Sometimes they will succeed. In 2021, I filed two employment cases just a few days apart, one in New York State court and one in the Eastern District of New York. This was purely a coincidence. But as it turned out two years later, I ended up filing summary judgment papers for the same two cases within a week of each other. The effective speed difference between the forums was almost literally zero. But while exceptions will occur, the general consensus is that state courts move more slowly.
Finally, there is another jurisdiction that promises faster resolution than any court. Arbitration. The parties have to consent – or be found to have previously consented – to arbitration, but the simplified processes, limited discovery, and lack of effective appeals can make arbitration a faster way of resolving cases. And there are circumstances, such as resolution of international commercial disputes, where arbitration is a preferable to reliance on foreign courts of unknown fairness or efficiency.
But is arbitration universally faster? It's hard to be certain. For example, we were once hired to try a case that was stayed pending an international arbitration for 21 years. Due to a variety of unusual circumstances, the arbitration stretched on for nearly two decades, making it old by the standards of even the slowest state court. In contrast, we once tried a case in the Southern District of New York a mere sixty-seven days after it was filed.
These are both outliers of course, and it may well be that arbitration is on balance a faster way of resolving cases. But given the radical lack of transparency in private arbitration I would not assume this to be universally true. And given the lack of effective appellate review, should you opt for arbitration on the grounds of speed it is essential that you pick both a forum and an arbitrator in which you have absolute confidence. Because the only thing worse than slow justice is injustice.
