Metropolitan News-Enterprise

March 4, 1993

Page 8
 

But his role model once he arrived on the bench was a far different cultural character.

"I kinda relate to Moses as a judge," Mallano says, sitting on the edge of a chair in his chambers. To illustrate his point, he gestures to a bust of the lawgiver next to the chair, and explains:

"Look at the expression of that statue--he's sad, like he's saying `God told me to get the people to obey these Ten Commandments, and I know they're not going to do it.'

"That's like a judge--you're trying to get people to obey the law, and you know they're not always going to do it. It's a heavy responsibility."

But Mallano's responsibilities for the next two years as presiding judge are perhaps even more arduous than that: persuading judges and
administrators on the court to get out of their ruts and change some of the ways they've always done things so they can perform more
efficiently--with less money.

So far, he appears to be succeeding.

Within his first two weeks of office, Mallano had announced his intention to convert all the downtown civil courtrooms to the individual calendar system by the end of March and given his blessing to first-step administrative coordination agreements for Superior Court districts in Santa Monica and Long Beach.

Earlier this month, the judge reached an agreement with the Los Angeles Municipal Court to have their respective top administrators come up with an administrative unification plan by March 17.

And, perhaps most importantly, the Superior Court last week submitted to the Judicial Council a new court coordination plan.

The speed in which that was accomplished--less than two months into Mallano's term--stands in sharp contrast to the performance of his
predecessor, Ricardo Torres, who took 8 months to come up with a 32-page plan that was not accepted by the Judicial Council. Such a plan was required by the 1991 legislation mandating coordination between county Superior and municipal courts.

Torres maintained that coordination was impossible without consolidation of the county's 24 municipal courts.

But Mallano declared that, although it was a good idea, the Superior Court "can't wait for the municipal courts to consolidate," and forged substantial agreements with most of the municipal courts in the county, including:

*The creation of joint committees with the municipal courts on jails, pro per litigants, legislation, bailiff/marshals, and ad hoc rules committees for civil and criminal courts.

*An agreement in principal to having one agency oversee all the courts' law enforcement and bailiffing functions. (Currently, the Marshal's Office oversees those functions for the municipal courts while the Sheriff's Department handles the Superior Court.)

*Separate agreements between courts in the Santa Monica and Long Beach courthouses, which have named joint administrators to oversee clerical functions, and an agreement in principle for the same type of coordination between the Superior Court's North Central District and the Glendale Municipal Court.

Mallano says he is confident the new plan will ultimately win approval from the Judicial Council.

Another sharp departure from the policies of his predecessor was naming three women as supervising judges and naming six women as court committee heads.

Torres, in an interview with California Lawyer magazine last year, said he didn't want to "take chances" by naming women judges to leadership positions. The comment cost Torres a private scolding from the Commission on Judicial Performance.

But Mallano declines to get into a discussion about his precedessor's policies, or about his own decision, saying only, "We have a lot of talent among the women and minority judges on the court--the assignments just reflect that."

Criminal Courts Supervising Judge Cecil Mills, a close friend of Mallano for over 20 years, says the new presiding judge "doesn't get involved in controversy if he can avoid it--but he won't duck it if he can't avoid it."

David Pasternak, head of the County Bar's ad hoc committee on court consolidation, describes Mallano's leadership style as "doing a lot quickly, and not reacting but initiating."

Pasternak says trial lawyers have been happy with Mallano's switch of all downtown civil courts to the individual calendar system and eliminating the Department 3 status conference hearings as of the beginning of this month.

"They had a good commissioner sitting [in Department 3], but it was expensive for clients, and I don't think a status conference there is as meaningful to them as a status conference before the trial judge in the individual calendar courts," Pasternak remarks.

Pasternak also praises Mallano's receptivity to input from lawyers and the bar associations, adding that the judge "appreciates the need to work with lawyers, not simply do things and wait for the reaction from lawyers."

Assistant Presiding Judge Gary Klausner agrees, saying Mallano's "likes to get a lot of consensus, likes to talk to a lot of people and get what their views are" and "likes to lead by winning people's approval."

One of the presiding judge's favorite sayings, Klausner relates, is: "Any change I want to make I want to make for positive reasons, not negative reasons."

But Arnold Gold, supervising judge of the Probate Department, emphasizes that Mallano "also knows how to be firm and say no when it's necessary."

Glendale Muncipal Court Presiding Judge James Edward Rogan says Mallano "has done a wonderful job in trying to bring in as many municipal courts as possible" into the Superior Court's coordination plan.

And Edwin Marzec, a long-time member of the Judicial Procedures Commission, an advisory panel to the Board of Supervisors, says he is "encouraged and impressed" by Mallano's accomplishments so far and his goals, adding that he believes Mallano's "management style will ensure his success."

The presiding judge says his key goal for the court during his term of office is for both judges and administrators to "continue to progress as managers in case management, in trial management, to cut down the [case] inventory, to decrease the time to trial" in order to "offer people the prompt justice they deserve."

Mallano notes that the critical problem the court faces in the next two years is doing more with less. He points out that the court has gone from a ratio of 10 employees per bench officer in 1992 to 9 employees at the beginning of 1993--i.e. from about 3,000 employees to about 2,700.

The decline, Mallano says, was the natural result of normal attrition and the court's hiring freeze. He adds that he expects the same causes will whittle the employee pool down by another 300 by the end of this year, which will hopefully obviate the need for layoffs.

The judge readily acknowledges that a budget cut this year is a virtual certainty, and that it's only a question of how much. He laughs when asked about his reaction to Gov. Pete Wilson's proposed budget--which would result in a $12 million cut to the Superior Court in state funding alone. The court could be facing an overall budget cut as high as $22 million--11 percent of the court's $198 million budget last year.

About $5 million of the expected cut, Mallano says, stems from lowerthan-expected revenues from the state's filing fee program. That program, instituted under last year's trial court funding bill, raised court filing fees and remitted them to the state, with the understanding that the state would return the money to the courts.

Mallano says he isn't sure why the filing fee revenues fell so short of expectations, but speculates the court may have had to give more fee waivers than it expected. Because of the state's recession and Los Angeles County's 10 percent unemployment rate, he notes, more people now qualify as indigent.

Just in the Central District's family law courts, he recites, the court waived $1.4 million in filing fees last year--many of them to people filing in pro per to enforce child support orders.

The remaining monies were one-time funding received from the county last year--money the county proposed to borrow from county employees' savings plans--which was used to fund the court's portion of the county's early separation program, Mallano says.

That ESP program, which ended Jan. 15, gave long-time county employees economic incentives to retire early.

"These are tough times, don't get me wrong," Mallano says, but adds that the courts "are not just an item on the state budget." He continues:

"The function of the judiciary in our society--the third branch of government--is set up because there has to be a resolution of disputes--criminal, civil, family. All these disputes are extremely important.

"We have to fulfill our function. The alternative to the courts not resolving disputes is people taking the law into their own hands."

He says he's "hopeful" that "ultimately that will be appreciated and something will work out so we have sufficient revenue so we can keep our doors open, meeting our mission."

The absolutely last recourse, he says, is to cut down on court hours or close the courts--as some counties have already done.

Mallano acknowledges that keeping the court funded at a reasonable level might even mean he might have to "walk down halls and knock on doors" in Sacramento, and says he is willing to do it. The presiding judge praises the Municipal Court Judges Association's relations with legislators, saying he would "like to see the Superior Court become better acquainted with our legislators."

But the real key, he says, is systemic changes in both employee and judicial resource management. Given the employee and budget cuts, he says, "We can't keep functioning unless we redesign the way we do things--everybody can't just keep doing the job the same way."

Instead, he says, the court must be "looking at every function our employees do, how a case is filed--it goes here, it goes there, how does it get it to the judge--[and ask], `Are we doing it the best way?'"

Mallano quickly answers his own question:

"I know we're not, because we haven't changed in 30-40 years. There's got to be a better way."

In a recent speech, Mallano joked that the Superior Court's technology dated from 5,000 B.C., "with the invention of papyrus."

Mallano says the court needs to move from that era to using automation for such functions as civil filings--which he says is now done with four people performing four different steps, at some points inputting computer information into different, incompatible systems.

"We have to do it in one step," he states, adding that the court's computer system should be set up so that one input at the civil filing window could provide all the information needed by all different parts of the court "just like when you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles." He says the court--in conjunction with the Los Angeles Municipal Court--is currently examining computer programs used by courts in Riverside and San Joaquin.

"Whichever is better, that's what we'll both invest in," Mallano says, expressing hope that the process won't take quite as long to set up as the criminal courts' ACTS computer program for tracking cases, which has been in the works for 12-1/2 years and has cost the court $25 million so far.

Mallano says he's a firm believer in so-called "management by walking around," with managers looking around the workplace, talking to their employees, and asking them how to improve functions. The judge says he may even ask managers to file reports with him on their results from such tours.

"There's a management maxim that says the lower in an organization an idea for change comes, the more likely it is to be completed," he remarks. "The person in the file room can tell you what's wrong--I can't."

His ultimate goal in changing civil filing procedures, Mallano says, is to modify the system so that lawyers can file their cases in any district and have the filing office assign it to the correct district.

"I can't see the point of, a Pomona lawyer who wants to file [a case] in Lancaster to have to drive it up there," he says. "There's no reason why the lawyer can't go to the Pomona Superior Court building and file it, and the clerk will ship the papers to Lancaster."

But greater employee efficiency is not the only answer, Mallano says, stating that judges also need to learn to manage their trials as effectively as possible. The court in January sponsored a two-day seminar for criminal court judges on the topic.

Another seminar will be given later in the year for civil court judges, Mallano says, although he says he expects that the major change in civil trial management downtown will be worked in the change from a master calendar system to individual calendars. Studies of the two systems, he says, have shown that time to trial in the individual calendar courts is almost half of that in the master calendar courts.

The judges have also come up with their own money-saving ideas--such as sharing libraries to save the court part of its current $1 million per year cost to provide judges with individual libraries, Mallano says.

Mallano makes a "zero" gesture with his fingers to describe his interest in management topics before taking a leadership role on the court. But since then, he says, he has taken courses, attended seminars, and read management books--including several by famed business guru Peter Drucker and, more recently, "Reinventing Government" by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler.

Good management, he says, is "more important now than it's ever been--if there's plenty of money, you don't have to be a good manager." The main themes that he gleaned from those studies, he says, are: 1) when you downsize, change the whole system, don't just lob off the bottom of the workforce; and 2) decentralize management.

"We need to empower our managers to make decisions in response to their needs," Mallano says.

One way decentralization could work, he says, is to give court managers in the district courts more authority in allocating their budgets, as long as they spend money on only approved items and don't go over budget.

But, Mallano adds, the court managers will be allowed to save money off one line item and apply it to another line item, eliminating the
use-it-or-lose-it mentality prevalent in bureaucratic budget reckoning.

Then, he says, when the budget cuts come "we tell the manager out there, `Okay, your budget cut is so much percentage, you figure out where you want it to apply'--that person can best figure it out."

Mallano is enthusiastic about the individual calendar system downtown--which has also been used in the North Central District for years--but acknowledges that it would not work in some courts, such as those where the judges spend most of their time handling criminal cases.

"I don't intend to have downtown dictate what the districts should do," he remarks.

Another district issue that may come up for discussion later in the year, Mallano says, is the allocation of judges in each of the districts.
"The districts that have the toughest time are the ones with older courthouses," he says--particularly Long Beach, Torrance, and Santa
Monica--which were designed for a much smaller population than they now serve.

The result, Mallano says, is that some of the newer courthouses "might have more judges than might be warranted by the number of case filings," which he says "doesn't make any sense."

Although it won't save the courts that much money, Mallano also believes a coordinated effort to bring about one set of rules for all the courts--for trial delay reduction, civil trial reduction, law departments, and criminal rules of procedure--would make life easier for both lawyers and judges.

The ultimate goal, he said, would be to have the same set of rules for both courts, that could be printed out as needed by laser printer, and be immediately updated on computers when they are changed. That, he says, would break the expensive cycle of drafting forms, printing forms, storing forms, and throwing old forms away when new forms are drafted.

Mallano has also expressed concerns about keeping a "bright line" between the private judging system and the courts. For instance, he has denied requests from JAMS to use courtrooms in the downtown courthouse.

Mallano also takes umbrage with ads by JAMS that claim it takes three years to get to trial in Los Angeles. "In the individual calendar courts, it actually takes 17 months," he remarks pointedly.

But besides the issue of equal justice for rich and poor litigants, he also has a very practical reason for being worried about the private judging system. He remarks:

"If the wealthy are using private judging, the people with clout won't be motivated to go to the Legislature and the governor and say 'Adequately fund the [court] system.'

"The poor don't have effective lobbyists, in case you haven't noticed."

But the presiding judge also asserts that the courts need to reach out to the general public more, and says the courts must rely on the media to do that.

Mallano states that his concern was amplified by a study released by the Judicial Council late last year on the public's attitude toward the courts which indicated that only half of 1,500 respondants overall rated the state's court system positively. About half said their confidence in the courts had diminished since last year's widely televised Rodney King police beating trial.

Other criticisms voiced by a majority of those surveyed were that the courts did not treat minorities equally, did not treat criminal defendants fairly, and doubted a woman's word more often than a man's. The survey also showed that confidence in the courts was lowest among African Americans.

"My personal feeling is, the quality of justice and fairness we give the minority groups is much better than their perception [of it]," Mallano says, but adds that people's perception of what the courts do is as important as what they actually do. He explains:

"If people's perception is, the court doesn't give them justice, then people act based upon their attitudes. They don't act upon what really is. We all do--we have attitudes in our lives, and they're kind of colored glasses that we look through, and what we see is affected by our attitudes.

"If people don't like something that happens, and they think can't get justice in court, they might take it to the street in violent acts."
That concern, Mallano says, was the reason he appointed Judge Diane Wayne--wife of former Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner--as head of the court's Media Committee, because of her connections with journalists.

"I really want to do something to improve the public's perception of justice, and I think the media is a useful vehicle in that regard," he says, noting that both he and Wayne have appeared on several radio shows--the Michael Jackson show and the Royal Oaks program--to talk about the courts and answer call-in questions from listeners.

"I think we as judges should help develop a feeling of confidence in the justice system, and I think the role of the media in that is key," Mallano says.

Asked about vows by activists that they will start another recall attempt against Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Joyce Karlin--who created a firestorm of controversy when she sentenced a Korean American grocer to probation for shooting and killing an African American teenager she believed was trying to shoplift from her store--Mallano pauses a long time, at least a full minute.

Finally, he states that although he hopes the activists would drop the recall bid and that he personally opposes it:

"I wish I could think of something I could say that would improve the situation or heal the wounds. But I'm at a loss for words to know what that is, I really am."

Ironically, Mallano grew up in the Compton area--near where many of the anti-Karlin activists live--where his father managed a box-making factory.

Mallano grew up an ardent fan of "Perry Mason" and spent his boyhood dreaming of becoming a criminal lawyer.

"I thought that looked real exciting," he explains.

The future judge became the first in his family to attend college, receiving his undergraduate degree in history from Yale University--where he also played on the football team.

He received his law degree in 1963 from Boalt Hall.

Following his graduation from law school, Mallano spent a year on a fellowship from Boalt studying canon and comparative law at St. Thomas Aquinas University and the University of Rome.

Mallano returned to Los Angeles in 1964 to join Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, spending two years in the firm's labor, corporate, litigation and estate planning departments.

In 1966 he joined the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office and was eventually assigned to try felony cases in the Torrance courthouse, leaving in 1969 to go into private practice with two other attorneys.

From 1976 to 1978, he also served as a procurator-advocate for the Los Angeles Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church, representing couples who wanted the church court to annul their marriages.

Mallano says he "had fun" in all those jobs "apart from a few family law cases that involved custody disputes that were really draining."

Although he had had glimmerings of the idea of becoming a judge as far back as high school, Mallano says, he only seriously decided he wanted to be a judge during his time with the District Attorney's Office. But he says he didn't start "making a push" for it "until after Jerry Brown was elected." Mallano explains that he was--and still is--a registered Democrat, and believed he would have a better chance for an appointment under a Democratic administration.

In the late 1970s, he joined several lawyers and other judges who had the idea to form the Italian American Lawyers Association. Mallano says he saw the group less as a vehicle to push his judicial candidacy and more as a place "where lawyers could have fun, and get together to eat spaghetti every other month."

But the idea changed, he said, after he mentioned it to then-Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Morio Clinco (since deceased).
Clinco, he says, "wanted to use [IALA] not for only for the social side but to have the governor recognize that he should appoint some Italian Americans," in accordance with Brown's then-unprecedented appointments of women and minorities as judges.

Longtime criminal attorney Paul Caruso became IALA's first president, and Mallano in 1978 ended up getting the group's first judicial
appointment--to the South Bay Municipal Court. Two years later he got the group's third appointment, when Brown elevated him to the Superior Court.

"They were very good to me," Mallano says of IALA, noting wryly that the group since then has become "less political" and more like his original vision of it.

The presiding judge shrugs off any suggestion about advancing to the Court of Appeal.

"Right now I want to finish this job, it's very challenging and I'm looking forward to doing it," he says. "What happens when I complete this is too far ahead to think about."

But he says he will be happy as a judge no matter in what court he serves.

"I haven't had an assignment I didn't like, I've loved them all, Mallano says. "Judging is a wonderful wonderful profession.

"Every day, I pinch myself--it's really fun coming to work."