The El Paso County Bar Association 1995 Special Master Project
| Jurisdiction | Colorado,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 25 No. 11 Pg. 91 |
| Pages | 91 |
| Publication year | 1996 |
1996, November, Pg. 91. The El Paso County Bar Association 1995 Special Master Project
Courts proceed step by step. Oliver Wendell Holmes(fn1)
The Fourth Judicial District ("Fourth J.D.") established a Family Court Division in 1991. It was designed to focus specialized jurists on the continuing stream of domestic relations litigation in the Pikes Peak Region. In the calendar year 1994, there were 5,073 domestic cases filed out of 17,248 District Court cases.(fn2) Domestic represented 29 percent of the cases filed. At the start of 1995, out of twelve full-time judges, there were four domestic relations judges assigned half their dockets of family law matters, with one full-time magistrate.(fn3)
Because of a shortage of judicial resources, the full-time magistrate was required to schedule and hear many of the temporary orders requests. Complicating the processing of domestic cases was the fact that more than half were filed pro se, although the Clerk of the District Court had developed a comprehensive and instructive packet of forms for use by pro se litigants, available for purchase at the counter.
The trend of more pro se domestic cases being filed was corroborated in a 100-case sampling done on November 18, 1994. Forty-two cases were filed by private attorneys, six cases by the district attorney, and fifty-two filed by pro se litigants.(fn4) An average of one-half hour was allowed to hear temporary orders by the magistrate. As requests for temporary orders relief backed up, despite overtime work by the court, it began to take from six to eight weeks to hear nonemergency matters. Emergency matters were given priority. Facing this congested docket, the Family Court judiciary felt the purposes of the Uniform Dissolution of Marriage Act, to promote "the amicable settlement of disputes" and to mitigate the "potential harm to the spouses and their children caused by the process of legal dissolution of marriage,"(fn5) could be better fulfilled by use of special masters to hear temporary matters on an experimental basis.
A design criterion of the trial program was to provide case control by early intervention to the benefit of the children of the litigants. In 1994, the El Paso County Bar Association had offered an experimental program creating a pro bono arbitration panel. The goal was to arbitrate submitted issues at no charge in cases where one party qualified for free legal assistance through Pikes Peak Legal Services. Arbitration in the dissolution of marriage context has been sanctioned by Colorado courts.(fn6) Unfortunately, no use was made of this trained panel of arbiters. It was surmised that the program was not used to resolve "pots and pans" and other disputes (which were extremely important emotionally, if not economically, even to those qualifying for legal aid) because practitioners and litigants were unfamiliar or, perhaps, fearful of agreeing to binding arbitration in the domestic relations context. Without court compulsion requiring the parties to use the panel, its fate of nonuse may have been sealed.
Enlisting many of those volunteers on the discontinued panel of arbiters, a Special Master Project was developed to run from January 1, 1995, through October 31, 1995, under the guidance of a volunteer project coordinator through the El Paso County Bar Association. All services of the participant lawyers were donated. No fees were charged the parties. No monies were budgeted. Costs were absorbed by the clerk's office, the coordinator's office, and the individual master's office. A panel of sixty-five lawyers served, comprising many of the leaders of the local domestic relations bar, all of whom met the following criteria:
1) licensed Colorado attorney in good standing with at least five years' practice experience;
2) willing to serve on a pro bono basis during the project term;
3) basic working knowledge of domestic relations law;
4) able to schedule assigned cases on short notice;
5) able to submit timely reports; and
6) acceptable to Family Court judges and project coordinator.
The general objective of the 1995 Special Master Project was to improve the administration of justice by utilizing the
Colorado law has provided since May 31, 1990, a speedy trial option in civil cases, using a special master on agreement of the parties, although it is rarely utilized.(fn7) Colorado Rules of Civil Procedure ("C.R.C.P.") 53 provides for order of reference to masters in any action.(fn8) While Rule 53(b) provides that reference ". . . shall be the exception and not the rule," some referred matters automatically met the standards of complicated issues and matters of account.(fn9) Local court rules on special masters, where inconsistent with the C.R.C.P., have been found to be a nullity.(fn10)
An arguable exceptional circumstance to invoke a referral to a special master was the denial of procedural due process by the lack of available judicial resources to hear fully and expeditiously matters on an emergency or temporary order basis, negatively impacting litigants and their children. However, the exceptional condition for reference has been held to include only those matters that would consume an undue amount of a trial court's time, where an accounting is necessary and property involved is of substantial proportions.(fn11) A general order of reference was entered on filing the case and authorized a master to make findings in denned areas to tender to the court for approval and for entry of orders. This referral to this ancillary form of...
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