Comment by rayiner
13 hours ago
It's really not. The legal system is slow and inefficient because it's a deeply pipelined system built to maximize the throughput of the bottleneck resource: judges. Judges are constitutional officers who exercise independent authority in meat space and thus are necessarily limited in number. The rest of the design flows from that.
If you got the judge, all the parties, and all the witnesses in a conference room together until the case was resolved, you could probably handle a lawsuit in a few months. But each judge has hundreds of cases pending before them, so that would never work. Instead, you get something like how a GPU works. You do some work on a case, submit the work to the court, then work on something else for a few months while you wait around to get the results back. Then you do some more work and submit it to the court, then go do something else for a few months while you wait to get the results back. A few months of actual work gets spread out over a few years that way.
Why stop there? The bottleneck is not some immutable force of nature. The number of judges is determined by legislative action. It is within Congress's power to allocate new federal judicial seats, and likewise at the state level with the equivalent lawmaking body (for most states, at least). Why don't they do so?
Because federal district court judges have a tremendous amount of power. You both don't want 10,000 of them running around and you don't want to water down the qualification for the position--if you did do that, then that would devalue their judgments, everyone would appeal, and you'd just shift the bottleneck up to the appellate courts.
At the end of the day, litigation is conflict resolution. You don't just need a decision, you need a decision from someone authoritative enough to bully Fortune 500 CEOs into submission to accept the judgment.