Judicial branch to attorneys: Start filing now.

Byline: Bill Cresenzo

Judicial branch officials have long warned that once the state's courts return to full operations, they will be faced with an unprecedented blizzard of filings and backlog of cases due to the COVID-19 crisis, and now data newly released by the North Carolina Judicial Branch help illustrate just how serious that crunch is likely to be.

As such, the Judicial Branch is imploring attorneys to start mailing in their filings now, two weeks ahead of the June 1 anticipated date of reopening that North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Court Justice Cheri Beasley has put in place.

Up until March 10 of this year, civil and criminal filings had closely tracked their number from 2019. But beginning with that week, when Beasley issued the first of a series of orders putting a hold on non-essential court proceedings, filings have plummeted by 54 percent, from 373,507 filings in the same period last year to just 172,497 this year. (And that understates the scale of the drop, since the period includes three work days before Beasley's first order took effect.)

Filings have already started to creep back up somewhat, from a weekly low of 17,517 in the first week of April to 25,125 by the end of the month.

Case dispositions, meanwhile, have dropped 65 percent, from 470,343 from March 10 through May 4 in 2019, to just 161,751 during the same period this year. (The report notes that 2019 had a higher-than-usual number of case dispositions due to the Data Integrity Initiative, an effort to "clean up old pending cases.")

"Reducing foot traffic into courthouses has been critical to slowing the spread of the virus as we moved through the early stages of this pandemic," Beasley said...