Late last week, the Court of Appeals threw out an appeal because the notice of appeal had not been filed in a timely manner.  Here is what happened.

A judge signed a final judgment and dated it.  Because the case was in juvenile court, the losing party had 15 days to file the notice of appeal.  The notice of appeal is merely a piece of paper, usually one page, that is filed with the court.  It simply says that the party is going to appeal the case.  Unfortunately, the losing party did not file the paper on time, the appeal was untimely, so the Court of Appeals threw it out.  The poor guy gets no appeal.

Several attorneys have expressed concern to me recently about inefficiency in the court system depriving litigants of their right to file an appeal.  Here is one recent story from an attorney in Salt Lake County.

The Judge signed the judgment on February 25, 2011.  The judgment is a piece of paper.  The Judge put the piece of paper on his clerk’s desk.  She was supposed to make an entry into the court computer system and then mail a copy of the judgment to all of the attorneys involved.  Unfortunately, the clerk didn’t do that.  The paper sat on the clerk’s desk until April 1 when the clerk entered it into the computer system.  The clerk never mailed a copy.

The attorney was worried about a judgment being entered and checked the court computer system every couple of days during the entire month of March.  The computer system showed no judgment until April 1.  Now the attorney wants to file an appeal but faces a very real possibility that the appeal will be thrown out because it was not filed timely.

I’ve talked to other attorneys who say this is happening in Salt Lake County, Utah County and Washington County on a regular basis.

I can only speculate to what is happening.  (1) the courts have been operating short staffed under tight budgets for the last few years and the clerks may simply be overworked.  (2) the court has been upgrading to a scanned document system and it may take extra work to enter documents into the court computer system.

I haven’t personally experienced a problem of judgments sitting on the clerk’s desk for a long period of time.  If true, it is a huge problem.  The courts need to get their act together.