Adapting to the Pandemic: One Judge's Experience

• Author: Hon. Mike Engelhart
• Pages: 18-22

Published in Litigation, Volume 47, Number 4, Summer 2021. © 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not

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Adapting to

the Pandemic

One Judge’s Experience

HON. MIKE ENGELHART

The author is a judge on the 151st Civil District Court, Harris County, Texas.

We needed to finish this jury trial. My last pre-COVID-19 day of

work at the courthouse was Friday, March 13, 2020. I was a little

over 11 years into my stint as a civil trial judge in Harris County,

Texas, which includes Houston. Squeezed into fewer courtrooms

than usual after Hurricane Harvey struck in late August 2017, jury

trials were already down. That had lasted two and a half years

already. So my case began to feel especially urgent and I felt com-

pelled to finish before... well, before... is “oblivion” too strong?

It was a lease dispute between a large national retail chain and

a local shopping center landlord, and I’d already reset the trial

multiple times. Now, to speed things up, we cut breaks short. The

abbreviated recesses were suffused with gossip about closing the

courthouse, social distancing, touching your face (“Don’t!”), and

toilet paper shortages. “Maybe just avoid a mistrial, Mike,” I kept

thinking. Who knew when we’d get another crack at it? We got

a verdict late in the afternoon on Friday, March 13, 2020. Friday

the 13th? Exactly. That was my last workday in the courthouse

for many months.

The Shutdow n

Our county administrator, state governor, and supreme court is-

sued a flurry of shutdown orders around that time, which would

soon become the stuff of novel, pitched litigation over who could

compel whom to do what. Newly minted Texas constitutional

Twitter scholars held forth on how Sam Houston or Stephen

F. Austin would or wouldn’t have countenanced wearing a face

mask or buying hand sanitizer. The net result was that I wasn’t

going to conduct live hearings or trials for a while.

Predictably, one of the first things to go was the jury call. No ju-

rors mean no jury trials. Of course, jury trials are not the only thing

civil district judges do, but they do fill the time any given week.

Until we could resume jury trials, we were left to figure out

how to proceed with oral hearings, cases submitted on the papers,

and non-jury trials, and to do so in a way that avoided grossly

backlogged dockets. How best to switch to videoconference tech-

nology to continue moving cases and parties through the system?

Of course, our court’s technical staff landed on Zoom almost

from the jump. The now-ubiquitous software quickly became

our portal to the bar.

But questions about security surfaced almost immediately. We

heard horror stories of internet trolls “bombing” Zoom hearings

by entering uninvited and displaying pornography. I’m confident

this didn’t occur in one of my hearings because, to paraphrase

Justice Potter Stewart, I would have known it had I seen it.

At the same time that we worried about sabotage, we had to

figure out how to satisfy our constitutional “open courts” ob-

ligations. That is, even in the middle of a global pandemic, the