Judicial Evaluation Committee’s Lloyd Liu: Attorney Feedback Is Key to Preserving Confidence in Our Courts
December 12, 2024
The annual judicial survey of selected judges of the D.C. Courts is now underway, and the D.C. Bar Judicial Evaluation Committee is calling on eligible D.C. Bar members to participate to help improve judges’ performance and the administration of justice in the District of Columbia.
This year the committee has selected 7 Court of Appeals judges and 29 Superior Court judges for evaluation. The survey is open to attorneys who had a case pending before one or more of the judges during the 24-month evaluation period (July 1, 2022, through June 30, 2024).
Lloyd Liu, a partner at BLL and chair of the Judicial Evaluation Committee, said attorney feedback on judges’ performance is essential. “Without this sort of feedback, and without judges being able to hear how litigants feel they are being treated, it’s a challenge for them to rely principally on their own evaluation of themselves,” Liu said. “And for the judges that I’ve encountered, they care deeply about the very same issues the survey is focused on. They want to know what they can do better. It doesn’t matter whether they’re new to the bench or experienced, they still want to know. They want to hear how others feel that they are doing.”
Liu, an adjunct professor at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, serves on the boards of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of the Greater Washington, D.C. Area and the William B. Bryant American Inn of Court. He is also a columnist for Washington Lawyer magazine. Here, Liu discusses more the value of the survey to judges, practitioners, and members of the public.
What is the goal of the Judicial Evaluation Survey?
The survey has a number of different goals, but the principal one is to have a fair, secure, and anonymous tool of evaluation for attorneys to provide feedback annually about D.C. Courts judges and to ensure that such feedback is provided in a useful manner to the chief judges and the D.C. Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure.
What information is the survey seeking?
The survey attempts to gather attorneys’ impressions of a judge’s temperament, their ability to manage a case, the reasoning behind their decisions — whether they are well-reasoned and well-decided — and, frankly, how litigants feel that they are being treated. Do they feel like they are being heard and treated fairly? This is a key issue on which we are trying to get feedback.
Why is it important for attorneys to participate?
First of all, it is very hard for judges to otherwise get feedback on their performance, for a variety of reasons. Certainly, in the context of a case, lawyers who appear before a judge might feel uncomfortable either complimenting or criticizing a judge. There are all sorts of issues that prevent that exchange from happening in the real world. So, the survey instrument provides a way for lawyers to provide that sort of feedback.
What does the judge do well? For example, is the judge patient? Does the judge manage his or her docket efficiently, dispose of motions in a timely way? How else could judges get that feedback without hearing from the lawyers who appear before them?
I think lawyers, as professionals, are better equipped to provide meaningful and constructive feedback, even if they might disagree with how a judge decided their particular case.
How is the material used after the survey is completed?
When the survey is completed, the Judicial Evaluation Committee reviews the results, which are not attributed to specific survey participants, principally to protect anonymity. One of our main priorities is to make sure that the integrity of the survey is maintained. That is to say, when we tell the public that their anonymity is protected, we take that extremely seriously.
Why do we do that? We want to make sure that lawyers don’t feel they may face reprisal or other negative effects if they should provide critical feedback on a judge.
Once that is done, the confidential and anonymous survey results go to the evaluated judges, the chief judges of the D.C. Courts, and the commission. From what we understand, they take the survey results very seriously and they review the report we provide them and find it helpful.
Serving as a judge can be isolating. Now, that isolation is important. It is part of the job so that a judge is purely evaluating a case on the merits and is not being influenced by other factors, but there can be a drawback to that; it inhibits the ability of the public to provide feedback.
The feedback is more important now than ever, given our crisis of judicial vacancies. Judges are overburdened, their dockets are overstuffed. Our judges have performed admirably under these conditions, but the vacancies are a situation that deserves our attention. The survey instrument is an important tool to help everyone monitor the overall health of the court.
Confidence in the courts is paramount. Having an opportunity to provide feedback promotes that. I think a close relationship between the bar and the judiciary is important, and the survey is one of the ways to facilitate that.
The 2024–2025 Judicial Evaluation Survey is available through 5 p.m. ET on January 10, 2025. To ensure confidentiality, the anonymous survey is administered by Research USA, an independent research organization. Eligible D.C. Bar members should have already received an email with the survey link in November. If you did not receive an email and are eligible to participate, please contact Research USA at [email protected].
