When Lake Forest attorney Murray Conzelman needed to file an emergency motion with the Illinois Appellate Court, he didn’t drive to Elgin, 30 miles away, where the 2nd District Court sits. Instead, Conzelman expedited the procedure by making an appearance before Illinois Appellate Judge Lawrence Inglis in his chambers in Gurnee.
Inglis (pronounced Ing-guls), 59, elected to a 10-year term on the court in 1988, and Fred A. Geiger Jr., 52, a Lake County circuit judge appointed by the llinois Supreme Court to the 2nd District Appellate Court in 1989 to help with a heavy caseload, maintain offices in Lake County.
Although the court as a whole sits in Elgin, these judges and their appellate colleagues, one level below the state Supreme Court, are spread throughout the state in neighborhood offices. So when news comes from the Illinois Appellate Court, consider that it may be an opinion that was formulated just down the street.
What’s more, at least in the case of Lake County’s pair of judges, these small offices are breeding innovation.
“Having their offices here makes a big difference because it keeps them involved in things on a local level,” said Mary Clark, Lake County Bar Association president. “They come to meetings and write articles for The Docket, our monthly publication. It keeps them part of the community.”
It makes a big difference for local judges too, said George Bridges, Lake County’s newest judge (sworn in March 27 in the 19th Judicial Circuit), who regularly breakfasts or lunches with the two appellate court judges. “It keeps everything in perspective so you don’t see them as something untouchable or unapproachable. They’re down to earth. It gives you a star that you can shoot for.”
“For residents, it gives them a feeling that we’re not some stranger sitting in Elgin,” Geiger said. “The biggest differences in having our offices here instead of Elgin is it keeps us closer to the people and to lawyers in the local courts,” Inglis added. “We’re not living in some ivory tower in Elgin and locking the door. We see people every day. They deal with the courts,” he said, explaining that the image of an appelate judge never leaving his research in the library just doesn’t apply to them.
Geiger’s office also is important because it was the first in the state to experiment with becoming completely computerized, according to Carter Cowles, a Virginia court consultant and former management information systems director for the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts. “As a result . . . , the amount of work Judge Geiger and his staff processed quadrupled,” Cowles recalled, adding that the system has been adopted in other judges’ offices statewide.
Geiger’s son, Fred III, an electrical engineer, designed the system to track cases from assignment through disposition.
“We’re striving for the most economical way to do research and writing,” Geiger said.
The chambers of Geiger and Inglis have complete sets of Illinois Appellate Court and Supreme Court decisions, but most of the research is on CD-ROM and in computer memory.
Thirty-one percent of the 2nd District’s casework comes from the 19th Circuit in Waukegan. “The 2nd District has the most challenging population issues,” said Mary Robinson, former appellate court defender and current chairwoman of the Attorney Disciplinary and Registration Commission in Chicago. “Because it includes Rockford, rural areas and the collar counties, it’s probably the most sophisticated mix of population centers, and it generates a challenge,” bringing corporate as well as property issues before the court.
The 2nd District, which includes Lake County, covers 6,8l0 square miles. It is one of five appellate districts in the state.
Currently, Inglis and Geiger are experimenting with more innovations. These are aimed at reducing court backlogs.
“Because of the population growth in the collar counties, in 1982 we had 755 cases, and now we have doubled that,” explained Inglis, the senior of nine judges in the district.
Inglis, Geiger and Robert McLaren, current 2nd District presiding judge, have established a system whereby judges can ask for extra work–simple single-issue cases–if they complete their monthly assignment of nine cases ahead of schedule. Cases are screened by research staff according to complexity.
“We’ve assigned 6 to 10 at a time, in addition to our regular caseload,” Geiger explained. “It started with an attitude that we wanted to do more, if we could,” Inglis added. “As a result, we believe we’ve reduced our backlog by the greatest of any district.”
According to the 1993 Report for the Administrative Office for State Courts, in the Chicago area the 2nd District now has the quickest rate of disposition from notice of appeal to resolution. According to Loren Strotz, court clerk in Elgin, by using this new system, the 2nd District has disposed of 10 percent more cases than it did last year.
“For these judges to take extra cases is extraordinary,” said Roger Hanson, senior policy staff associate for the National Center for State Courts in Williamsburg, Va. “They’re exemplary in allocating resources to keep up with the problems facing appellate courts.”
That Geiger and Inglis would be focal points for so much innovation doesn’t surprise local attorneys. When Geiger was chief judge of the 19th Circuit in 1986-88 and Inglis was 2nd District presiding judge from 1992 until this year, both implemented significant changes.
“Fred’s not afraid to try new ideas,” said retired Appellate Court Judge Lloyd Van Deusen of Waukegan, next-door neighbor to the Geiger family when Fred was a child. Geiger’s father, a Libertyville resident, is a retired circuit judge.
Geiger is an expert in court security throughout the world, the result of an incident when he was a Lake County circuit judge.
In 1984, during an attempted-murder case, about 30 people–members of the plaintiff’s and defendant’s families–started a fight as both groups headed toward the courtroom’s only exit.
Geiger tried to call for help, but the phone lines were jammed. “It was so noisy they could hear the fight in the jail in the next building,” he recalled. “Jailers came running. Ultimately it was subdued, but I was dismayed that I couldn’t reach court security. That led to my interest.”
He has consulted with other countries on courtroom security problems, and he writes and lectures extensively on the subject.
Inglis, a member of one of Zion’s leading families, founded and was first president five years ago of the Jefferson Inn of Court, the local chapter of a national legal honorary society organized to improve ethical conduct of the legal profession and improve relations between the bench and bar.
“With the permission of the (Illinois) Supeme Court, twice I’ve taken our court to Northern Illinois Law School in DeKalb and done a mock courtroom and heard actual cases,” Inglis said. He also taught for several years at the Illinois New Judges Seminar.
“Judge Inglis never sits with something because that’s the way it’s always been done,” Robinson said. He has worked with a group of appellate lawyers to give a seminar for the public on appellate court judges, using the judges’ living quarters in the courthouse. “The general public had never been invited in,” Inglis said. That struck him as a bad reason not to do something, Robinson explained.
“Both Larry and Fred are good examples of a rule that used to be quite prevalent but no longer seems as popular,” said attorney Conzelman, also a Supreme Court Rules Committee member. “Larry practiced for almost 20 years in Lake County, Fred about 12 years. They were chief judges of the Lake County (Circuit) court, and they understand how trial court and the appellate level should be operated. The trend today is to go from law school to the state’s attorney’s office to the bench. Those people, however well intentioned, have no idea what I do since they’ve never practiced law.”
“The appellate court can be a mysterious thing,” added Rudy Magna, a Gurnee attorney and Lake County Bar Association president-elect. “Because Fred and Larry do a lot of public speaking locally, they do a lot of interpretation to make sense of the court system for citizens groups.”
“They know the territory,” Conzelman said. “They grew up here. It’s comforting when you’re arguing a case. They know the property. They know the people. They have a feel for what’s happening in the county.”
