Chief Justice Harold D. Melton of the Supreme Court of Georgia announced a Statewide Judicial Emergency on March 14, 2020 (“the judicial branch of government to suspend all but essential court functions.”). With cautious reluctance, we complied in varying degrees. Judges directed court personnel to postpone motion hearings and jury trial calendars, attorneys canceled depositions and work-related travel, national and local ADR companies such as JAMS, Miles Mediation and Henning touted their preparedness to work through the judicial pause and continue helping their clients to resolve disputes using technology and already developed virtual platforms, and law schools scrambled to transition to online, virtual learning for their law students. Bracing for what was to come, court administrators and government in general conservatively estimated this unprecedented judicial pause would last a few months. In hindsight most everyone was unrealistically optimistic, thinking that by the summer 2020 the legal profession would return to normal and resume the hectic pace of business as usual.

Professionally, I began entertaining requests to reschedule arbitrations and mediations. For the first month, “better safe than sorry” became the standard for gauging whether to grant a continuance for a few to several weeks or, in fact, push case resolution further into the early fall. Initially, it felt like I was able to wield the judicial case management gavel and set new dates based on what I thought was reasonable, but quickly the reality that firms and companies had suspended travel for their employee witnesses, attorneys and support staff compromised my ability to establish concrete timelines. We were all homebound, like it or not. Chief Justice Harold Melton entered his first of some 15 monthly 30-day extensions of his emergency order in mid-April, and by the May 2020 extension, we realized this pandemic was going to last for much, much longer and engineering safe, effective litigation workarounds were needed.

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