Wednesday January 23, 2013

So, after a week without posting I’m back. Montreal was great as always and we didn’t really miss much under the golden dome when we were away. What is remarkable was that on Friday of last week the House Appropriations Committee voted out H. 47, the budget adjustment bill. It’s a midyear correction to the state’s spending. Fortunately for the judiciary the bill includes $2 million dollars that the judiciary needed. The bill passed the House on second reading yesterday on a voice cote and final action will occur this afternoon. let’s hope the funding for the courts stays in at this level; it’ll really alleviate a number of problems.

Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on H.1, a bill that would relieve the superior court clerks from the requirement of maintaining a separate book of judgments. Actually, I never knew that there was such a book. The testimony so far points to the requirement being somewhat redundant and of little value. Kathy Hobart, Clerk of the Lamoille Superior Court, offered that her survey of other clerks showed that they are almost never asked to produce the book. The Committee will return to the bill tomorrow afternoon and, barring any opposition, will likely vote it out and send it to the floor for action.

While that was happening the Senate Judiciary Committee began work on S. 1, a bill that would require a court to consider the approximate financial cost of available sentences prior to its issuing a sentence. More testimony needs to be taken and at this point I’m not certain where the bill may go.

This morning the Senate Judiciary Committee heard from Susan Murray and Mark Langan on S. 31, the bill that would overturn the Billings v Billings case. Susan was pretty clear about her and other family practitioners’ concerns about the case itself. She told the committee that the case created evidence problems, cost problems to the parties, to third parties and to the court itself, and family relationship problems. Mark spoke from the perspective of an estate planner whose clients may want protection from disclosure in some cases. they certainly don’t want to be subpoenaed to court in a divorce action.  The committee seems disposed to move the bill even though there may be some issue with the language about civil and criminal penalties for a party’s acting in bad faith. They will return to S. 31 on Friday, February 1^st in hopes of marking it up and voting it out. If any of you have concerns that this bill “goes too far” please let me know ASAP so I can get you before the committee next Friday. I’ll be cutting this paragraph and sending it out to both the Family Law and Probate and Estate Section list serves.

Finally, on a non legislative front, the VBA Board is looking into developing a protocol for dealing with the “medium” sized case, whether you define that at $50K or $75K or some other number. The Board is setting up a study committee to begin discussing how best to handle these types of cases to move them through the system at an affordable cost and timeline for litigants. Please let me know if you have any input on this topic and/or if you want to be involved in the working group.

As always, thanks for reading.