Reflections on the civil division from the supervising judge nine months into the job

Nine months into the job at Department 1, Judge Riff explains why this is an exciting time to be in court leadership

2025 November

I thank Advocate for the opportunity to share some reflections after nine months on the job in Department 1 as the supervising judge of the Civil Division of the Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles. These are my reflections alone and I am not speaking on behalf of the court.

Reflection One

I am among a small group of judges who have had the honor of leading two divisions of our court – in my case, family law and now civil. A question I am sometimes asked is, why would one want to be the supervising judge at all, and for heaven’s sake, why would one want to do it twice? The answer is not because of the prestige of the position, although there is some of that. But that wears thin very quickly. The truth is that the job of a supervising judge is often lonely and tedious.

Despite having an excellent assignment in a complex civil court in the Spring Street Courthouse, I sought my current job for these reasons. First, because I am closing in on the end of my judicial career and if there is anything big left to try to do, I figured I had better try to do it now. Second, because I think our court, like much of the rest of society, is in an historic era of change and it is not a given that we will make the right decisions in the first instance. I want to do what I can to try to guide us in the right direction. Third, for those same reasons, now is a particularly exciting time to be in court leadership.

Reflection Two

From an organizational structure perspective, our court is an exceedingly flat organization comprised of very smart and successful people who are appropriately protective of their independence. Many do not accept the proposition that they need supervision or leadership. Many are skeptical of anointed leaders. A leader on our court must proceed incrementally and by building consensus. (Consensus is not necessarily “agreement;” it can be instead, “I can live with that.”) John Boehner, the former Speaker of the House, observed that a leader without any followers is just some guy taking a walk by himself. Leadership on our court is an exercise in persuasion, attending to detail, delivering results and recognizing the multiplicity of constituencies both within and without the court.

Reflection Three

Our court is a remarkable institution in its scope and its ambition. The folks who have found themselves in leadership roles, whether on the judge or the administrative side, are remarkable people. Remarkable for their smarts and for their experience. It’s fun and exciting interacting and working with remarkable people. I recommend for your reading my Los Angeles Daily Journal series on “the most important people at the LASC you’ve never heard of” to get some flavor for the quality of people I have the privilege to work around.

Reflection Four

We are a court under substantial stress. It’s been that way for so long that it might seem like it’s normal but it’s really not.  By stress, I mean that we do not have a full complement of judges – we are constantly between 15 and 30 shy of our authorized number. Why? Because our retirements outpace our inflow of appointments and elected judges. Judicial pension reform explains a part of it. The rise of third-party neutral organizations is another reason. We are also under stress because we are underfunded. Although our 2025-26 budget is a very large number, based on standard work resource study metrics, we are underfunded by about 9.8%, which equates to many dozens of millions of dollars in underfunding. So much of what the court does turns on the work of staff, not judges, and this is where the funding really pinches. Judicial assistants, courtroom assistants, probate attorneys, research attorneys, interpreters – if we had the funding, we would have more of these essential workers.

Reflection Five

In the face of these ongoing stressors, in the civil division we are seeing record-breaking numbers of new filings in both limited and unlimited civil, roughly 20% year over year from operating year 2023-2024 to operating year 2024-2025. We are seeing huge increases in lemon law and personal injury cases; our very large inventory of unlawful detainer cases shows a very modest dip of late but it remains a huge number of new filings per month. So, more work and fewer judges and staff to do the work.

Reflection Six

It is clear to me that doing our work in the customary fashion is not going to work going forward. We are seeing more incoming cases per month into our IC and limited civil courts than those courts are closing per month. The water level, so to speak, has been constantly increasing. And with the closure of the PI Hub courts – a good thing in my view – the IC courts have seen their pre-COVID inventories jump from, say, 500 cases to 1,200. When I came into the job nine months ago, I saw two principal challenges facing the division. One was a significant backlog of trial-ready cases that were not getting out. The second was a bench struggling to keep up with new filings.

Reflection Seven

We have made huge progress on getting trial-ready cases out to trial through Department 1. I can report: there is no trial backlog at all in D1 as of this past summer. Any case sent to D1 for trial assignment to a dedicated trial court goes either forthwith, or within two business days, or to a date further in the future at the joint request of the parties. The reason is because so many of our judges – and not only in the civil division – have raised their hands to say that they are available to take a trial-ready case. I thank these judges for doing so from the bottom of my heart.

Reflection Eight

We are developing exciting new ways of doing our work that will in the mid- and long-run very much improve our efficiency while maintaining the quality that justice requires. In my view, the answer is not solely more judicial departments. They can help, for sure. Over the past few months we have opened new IC courts in Van Nuys, Chatsworth, and Santa Monica, and I expect we will do so soon in Long Beach. And we just added two more judges to our shockingly busy collection court hubs in San Fernando and Norwalk. But adding a new department, without changing the way we do business, is like adding another lane to the 405. It, too, will be jammed soon enough. 

I think much of the answer lies in automation. This does not mean turning over the judicial function to ChatGPT. But it does mean taking advantage of new techniques and technologies that will reduce the number of judicial and staff touches on the file, and the number of hearings between filing and disposition. The goal is for judges to spend their time in high-end discretionary decision-making and not in ministerial tasks that can be done by a machine. For example, any time a judge now spends searching a file to determine if service is complete is a bad use of judicial time. As they said 15 years ago, “there’s an app for that.” I foresee an expansion of “Pathway”-like programs for certain species of litigation, which means more automated hearing and trial settings, and more automated OSCs for failure to meet specified milestones. That is either good news or bad for you depending upon your business model. I foresee more expedited hearings, especially as related to demurrers and discovery disputes.

Reflection Nine

We are on the leading edge nationally of operations and process improvements. That may sound anodyne, but it is the stuff of access to justice, and more prompt and effective resolution of disputes. It is important. And this goes back to the exciting part of the job. We are working with national thought leaders from the RAND Corporation, Stanford University, UCLA and the National Center for State Courts on far-reaching innovations. An example: A very large proportion of plaintiffs (landlords) in unlawful detainer matters are represented by counsel; a very large proportion of defendants (tenants) are not. Our colleagues at Stanford University are working with us, staying in our lane of neutrality, to improve the communication (language and pictographs) coming from the court to tenants about the importance of timely response to a complaint and how to acquire useful information. Another example: Watch for our introduction in December of what we are calling Court Commons, which is a pop-up resource designed to deliver programs, civil education and real-time support directly to the community. This is a truly groundbreaking innovation arising from our community-engagement initiatives. We often speak of meeting the public “where they are” and normally, we are speaking figuratively. Not so, here; we mean it literally: We’re going to their neighborhoods.

Reflection Ten

This is my residuary category. Judges must have humility: not every problem can be solved by a ruling; some are rooted in poverty, addiction, trauma, or systemic dysfunction. Procedural justice really matters. Litigants often care as much about feeling heard and respected as  whether they “win.” The invisible bureaucracy of the court matters. It is both enabling and constraining – case management systems, calendars, and rules shape outcomes as much as substantive law. Last, judicial authority is fragile and so valuable. Respect comes less from robes and gavels than from consistency, fairness, and patience, courtesy and respect.