Simplify case management to fast-track case resolutions

In reference to the column of former chief justice Artemio Panganiban, “Hackles on judicial delays” (4/28/19), allow me to react as a former clerk in a division of the Court of Appeals which used to suffer from an overload of pending cases.

We were able to reduce the backlog in our division  by more than half in a matter of two years. How? By simple case management!  We classified cases into easy and difficult or complicated ones.

Believe it or not, about 80 percent of those cases involved issues that have already been settled by jurisprudence. Why lawyers keep coming back to court with such issues could only mean intent to delay.

All it took to resolve those cases were one- or two-page resolutions that took no more than a week or two to produce.  Why that is so hard to do in the Supreme Court beats the heck out of us, even as CJ Panganiban himself has revealed that a “vast majority of the high court’s decisions simply reiterate old doctrines” (“Confronting SC’s mounting backlog,” 4/7/19) and therefore are really no-brainers. Is it lack of wisdom or just plain laziness?

ROMAN M. MONTENEGRO,

[email protected]