They definitely do. I know a judge personally and he's very proud of his 'settlement rate', the fraction of all cases he sees that end up being settled without a judgment rendered.
Trials burn a large chunk of the judge's time. The more cases settled out of court, the faster the judge can move through cases, and the less delay between bringing a case and the case being resolved.
That's absurd, and tantamount to a judge not doing their job, which is to oversee the proper discovery and application of precedent. I'd even make the contention that this fundamentally deprives people of their right to due process, and if it is the case that the judiciary cannot handle case loads, we need to start talking about the structural reasons resulting in that.
>It takes a long time to bring a case to trial. I think that at least part of the bottleneck is the judges' time, but I cannot prove that.
By and large, it takes as long as it does, especially based on cases between actors with drastically different resource pools from which to pool to acquire legal representation, because of fundamental limitations on the ability of information to be unambiguously extracted by a legal team (defendants team in finding docs that match criteria for discovery), the plaintiffs team (to comb through the discovered docs for meaning; thos is where malicious compliance or poorly worded queries can be disasterous for the amount of work it takes to sift through paper), transformed (arranged into a cross ref'able set of docs to be used in further proceedings), and loaded (brought before a jury).
The work of a trial is simple given good faith on the parts of all parties. I wager that happens much less frequently than we'd all like to believe.
When the prime arbiters of the judiciary start resorting to "just bypass us" there is a terrible, terrible problem here.
