What Do You Do When a Court Is Taking a Long Time Issuing a Ruling?

Within the bounds of civil and commercial court proceedings, judges have the right to take 5 business days to prepare a court ruling. When it comes to administrative cases, this period is extended to 10 business days.

What do you do in situations (which, unfortunately, are quite common) where judges take an extended period of time to write up your ruling?

As a rule, delays in coming up with the analytical part of the court ruling stems from judges having a major workload, which is particularly true for the courts in Moscow and the Moscow Oblast. It’s a good idea to ask the judge around what day the ruling will be ready on (as a rule, being aware of the workload they have, they are able to inform the approximate date when they will issue the ruling). However, that’s not a panacea either. It’s common that a judge will declare that the ruling will be ready in, say, two weeks’ time, but then two months pass by and the ruling still isn't ready.

Step 1:

When the time period  that the judge announced has run out, one must contact the front desk for civil cases or the judge’s office to ask how close the ruling is to being ready. That is, if one can manage to get a hold of them. One just has to keep calling. If one is unable to reach them over the phone, they will have to visit the court in person.

Step 2:

If it turns out that the ruling isn't prepared yet, one can get in touch with the chairman of the corresponding court and submit a request to speed up the composition of the analytical part of the ruling. The request must indicate the date of the ruling's announcement, the date when the ruling must be prepared in its final form, and the amount of time that has already passed since that date.

Often times, court chairmen deny requests to speed up the process, however they are able to influence the judge which may end up leading to the long-awaited ruling being reached.

Step 3:

If that means of influencing the judge fails and truly a lot of time has passed (we’ve encountered cases in our practice where the analytical part of the ruling takes a year or longer to prepare), the next step is writing a message addressed to the chairman of the court for an appeal. He can then send an order to the first instance court and establish a date it will be fulfilled by. For the record, the law does not provide for this means of influencing a busy or underperforming judge. However, we know well that all procedural options come in handy when fighting for results in court ordeals.

Step 4:

However, if even that measure does not produce any results, and after several months, still no final ruling has been issued, one can get in touch with the qualification board of judges to file a complaint against the specific judge. The complaint is to be submitted to the board of judges of the particular subject of the Federation that the court and judge operate within that are causing the bureaucratic delays.

The qualification board of judges will then hear each request and require the corresponding court to issue an explanation for the judge’s actions. This measure is effective and speeds up delayed processes in achieving a ruling.

Extra step:

If the judge complains that he or she has a major workload, one can always propose that a judicial act project be prepared. This practice is widespread in commercial courts. As for general jurisdiction courts, however, for the time being, this occurring would be more of an exception to the rule. After a well-founded analytical portion of the ruling is written up, the winning side will obviously be able to speed up the process, thus providing invaluable assistance to a court that’s always busy.

On the whole, the court process is not only about opposing arguments battling it out, writing up documents in a professional fashion, and adept participation in hearings, but also a mundane, continuous process of writing and submitting complaints and requests as well as visiting offices and making phone calls (sometimes all for nought). In order to achieve results, one must not only have legal support and experience by one's side but also have never-ending persistence.