Letter: Judge’s time spent more efficiently at home than in office

Tuesday, Aug. 10, 1999 | 9:15 a.m.

In 1991 I spent the first nine months to a year on the bench trying to do all work at the courthouse and found the courthouse to be a large office building where a lot of your potential productive time was spent shooting the breeze with co-workers.

There is a lot of work to be done as a judge. I read a study from Northwestern University that indicated working at home was more efficient in the computer age (it is called telecommuting) by some 30-40 percent because of the lack of interruption.

I have found the increase in efficiency great enough that I have been able, for almost two years to not have the county employ me a law clerk at a cost of about $50,000. I am the only judge not to have a law clerk and have permitted the savings to be used to hire an additional law clerk for the civil judges who are overworked.

My point in opposing a rule as to when we work or where we work is that I frequently work processing cases after 5 p.m. during the week and on weekends. I am not an hourly employee and I see no difference working on a Sunday as opposed to during the week, spending more time on Sundays, sometimes, than any other day of the week, getting prepared for the next week. I think the criterion for evaluating a judge's performance is how effectively he processes his cases -- not whether he is sitting behind his desk at the courthouse as opposed to at his office at home.

To my knowledge, no other trial court in the country has adopted a rule saying where a judge's work must be conducted, and with all due respect the Nevada Supreme Court who directed us to adopt it has no similar rule for itself.

JEFFREY D. SOBEL District Court judge