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Civil discovery is much more complicated and time consuming. In most jurisdictions,
the discovery proceedings must be substantially complete before the attorneys can
ask for a trial date. Once a trial date has been requested, the case is put in a queue
with every other case set for trial. This queue is often six months to a year long. In
some urban courts, it may take two or more years to go to trial after discovery is
complete. The delay can be longer in jurisdictions where there are a lot of pending
criminal cases because these bump civil trials, irrespective of how long the civil trial
has been pending.
It is the uncertainty of the process, not the delay itself, that is the most difficult
aspect of the trial- setting queue. It is difficult to predict how long a trial will last, so
to increase their efficiency, many courts schedule several cases for each trial date.
This ensures that the court will have work to do, even if several of the cases settle
right before trial. This also means that several of the cases that are set on a given date
will not be tried as scheduled. The attorneys cannot be sure whether their case will be
reached. To be prepared to try the case on the specified date, they must contact
witnesses, prepare trial documents, and review the case with their client—time-
consuming, and thus expensive, work. It is not unusual for a case to be set for trial
and then be postponed several times.
D. Admitting Evidence
The rules of civil procedure allow the attorneys to discover any information that may
lead to admissible evidence. Some time before, or at the start of trial, the court will
begin the process of reviewing the evidence that the attorneys plan to submit and
determining, what, if any, of it is admissible. The rules for admissibility are much
stricter for evidence in criminal cases because of the constitutional protections for the
defendant. The outcome of many criminal cases is decided by the judge’s rulings on
which evidence is admissible. For example, the judge may exclude a confession or a
murder weapon because it was obtained improperly. Although the constitutional issues
of improper search and self-incrimination are not a problem in civil trials, witnesses
and other evidence may still be excluded if it is unduly prejudicial or if it does not
meet the legal standards for credibility. Once evidence has been admitted, it is subject
to cross- examination.
1. Protecting the Jury
The legal preliminaries necessary to establish the qualifications of a witness are long
and tedious. If the opposing attorney takes issue with the witness’s qualifications or
testimony, these objections will usually be discussed outside of the presence of the
jury. First, the jury will be removed from the courtroom. Then the lawyers and judge
spend several minutes discussing the legal issues involved, and finally the jury is
brought back into the courtroom. The effect is to break up the flow of trial, making
the proceedings confusing and frequently tense. In a hotly contested case, there can
be days of hearings on evidence before the jury is impaneled and, once it is sitting,
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