Despite Cutbacks, Night Court’s Small Dramas Go On

“Look at the bright side, it’s Oct. 27 in this year,” Judge Purificacion said, with a gallows-humor grin.

The New York State courts have taken a $170 million budget cut, and the small-claims courts in New York City are taking an especially big hit, with many night sessions eliminated, growing lines and increasing delays. But life does not stop, so the modest dramas of the small-claims courts are piling up: neighbor disputes, battles over bedbugs, and grudge matches that spill out into the hallways.

“I don’t know how long I’m going to be coming here,” Ms. Carter said, before she gets her day in court — or in this case, night in court.

Visiting the night small-claims court on Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica offers a catalog of the irritations of city life, writ small. A livery-car driver was irate. Two former friends seemed about to spit. And Tashmina Muslima was dejected when her case against her former landlord was postponed until November, the next time an official Bengali interpreter would be available.

“I’m very surprised,” Ms. Muslima said outside Judge Purificacion’s courtroom, “because this is a very important place to come for justice.”

With court budgets cut in some 30 states, small-claims courts have been among the least noted casualties.

But some judges say cutbacks in “the people’s court” can be among the most painful because a small-claims case can keep a little annoyance (under $5,000 in New York) from growing into a big one. No lawyers are required, and night sessions make justice accessible to people who work.

But in some places across the nation, small-claims courts are a little smaller than they used to be because of state financial trouble. In Covelo, Calif., the court that handles small claims and other cases now meets once every other month, instead of once a month. In Clackamas County, Ore., night court for small claims has been eliminated.

In New York, budget reductions that went into effect in April mean that in four boroughs, night small-claims courts that once met four nights a week meet only on Thursday nights.

On Staten Island, night small-claims court meets only once a month.

In Queens, court officials have nearly doubled the list of cases facing the single night court judge every Thursday, to about 200. Even so, they project that newly filed small-claims cases are soon likely to have to wait until 2012 for their first court date, about four times the 45-day wait before the cutbacks. “It’s going to snowball,” said Charles S. Lopresto, the supervising judge in the Sutphin Boulevard courthouse.

By 7:30 on a recent Thursday night, Judge Purificacion was deep into the first of eight trials he would conduct that night. A home improvement contractor, it seemed, had promised a palatial bathroom. But, according to the homeowner, the contractor had arrived with “a vagrant, which is also a convict” as his helper, and when they left “the floor was down here and the bathroom was up here.”

The contractor’s argument had a certain elegant simplicity. “He’s lying in court,” he said. Judge Purificacion, who was a children’s book editor and writer before he was a lawyer, was economical in his use of time. Within minutes he was on to the next trial.

A decision would be in the mail, which is not how Judge Judy does it on television, but it has the advantage that people sometimes leave court calmly when emotions run high.

Judge Purificacion moved on to the case of the shared driveway, a suit by Jose A. Moncada against his neighbors in Ozone Park, Maria and Shawn Charles. Mr. Moncada claimed damage to a piece of his motorcycle, which he said the Charleses knocked over in the driveway.

He seemed to be waving the broken part in an envelope. But he did not get to unveil it. In short order, Judge Purificacion had both sides at his bench under the “In God We Trust” sign. He was putting numbers in an oversize calculator he uses to demonstrate the benefits of settlement. Soon, he had the neighbors agreeing that the Charleses would give Mr. Moncada $250 in three payments.

For the moment, peace seemed to reign.

By now, Judge Purificacion was grimacing in his chair because of a back twinge. He had heard cases all day before starting night court at 6:30.

But, onward: the case of the livery driver, Nurul Afsar, whose dispatcher said he had faked an accident. “That a lie,” Mr. Afsar testified.

The decision would be in the mail.

The bedbug trial was next. It was 10 p.m. But before the landlord’s lawyer, Patrick McGuire, could ask a single Perry Mason question of the tenant, Claudia Medina, there was shouting in the hall.

“He’s a bully!” someone screamed. “I want this man arrested!”

Court officers went running. In the hallway, Mr. Charles and Mr. Moncada, the neighbors with the shared driveway, were nose to nose. The spirit of amiable settlement was gone, despite what Judge Purificacion’s calculator had said. There was some pushing, and Mr. Moncada was hustled by the officers out onto Sutphin Boulevard, while Mr. Charles was told to stay put. They would be allowed to leave only separately.

Peace returned to the courthouse. But Mr. Charles said he and his neighbor were not likely to be friends. They had been in small-claims court before and were likely to be back, he said. .

Inside the courtroom, Mr. McGuire was cross-examining Ms. Medina on what he suggested was her unproven theory that bedbugs had infested her apartment in Kew Gardens as a result of inattention by the landlord. “There is,” he asked, knowing the answer in the almost empty courtroom, “no expert to testify as to the bedbug nature?”

She had not brought an expert, she conceded. It was 10:30, and the decision would be in the mail.

It was time for the case of the former friends. One wanted money for storing furniture for the other.

“Did you hear what she was saying under her breath?” the first one asked.

“I don’t want to see her,” said the other.

It was the last case Judge Purificacion had time for. There were 50 others ready that he had not gotten to.

When he sent the two former friends home at 11:15, he told them to leave the courthouse separately.

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Abramson to Replace Keller as The Times’s Executive Editor

Ms. Abramson has been one of Mr. Keller’s two top deputies since 2003, serving at his side as he steered The Times through a period of journalistic distinction and economic distress. Mr. Keller said that with the paper’s finances now on surer footing, he felt at ease handing the reins to Ms. Abramson.

The move was accompanied by another shift in senior management. Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief and former editor of The Los Angeles Times, will become the managing editor for news.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher and the chairman of The New York Times Company, thanked Mr. Keller, calling him a “truly valued partner” in a speech Thursday morning in the Times newsroom, where the staff stood shoulder to shoulder to hear the publisher announce the first changeover in the top editing jobs in eight years.

Turning toward Ms. Abramson, who will become the first woman to be editor of the paper in its 160-year history, Mr. Sulzberger said, “Jill, Bill’s decision to step down may be bittersweet. But the thought of you as our next executive editor gives me and gives all of us great comfort and great confidence.”

The appointments are effective Sept. 6. John M. Geddes, 59, will continue in his role as managing editor for news operations.

Over the course of Mr. Keller’s tenure, the paper won 18 Pulitzer Prizes and expanded its online audience to some 50 million readers worldwide. But the economic downturn and the drift of readers and advertisers to the Web also forced the paper to lay off members of the news staff and tighten budgets considerably.

“A couple of years ago, everybody was wringing their hands about doomsday for the news business,” Mr. Keller said to the staff, his voice emotional at times. “People talked, some of them rather smugly, about even The New York Times not being long for this world. And now you look around, and we are economically sturdy. We are rich in talent. We are growing.”

Mr. Keller will continue to write for The Times Magazine and as a columnist for the new Sunday opinion section, which will make its debut this month. Mr. Sulzberger said he accepted Mr. Keller’s resignation “with mixed emotions,” adding that the decision to leave was entirely Mr. Keller’s.

Mr. Keller, 62, is still a few years shy of the paper’s mandatory retirement age for senior executives, but he held the top job for roughly the same period of time as Max Frankel and Joseph Lelyveld, two of the editors who preceded him. Mr. Frankel and Mr. Lelyveld returned to the newsroom for the announcement.

Mr. Keller had asked Ms. Abramson to be his managing editor in 2003 as he assembled a team that he hoped would restore confidence in the paper after the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. Ms. Abramson had been part of a group of editors who clashed with Howell Raines, the executive editor who was forced out after Mr. Blair’s fraud was discovered.

Ms. Abramson, 57, said being named executive editor was “the honor of my life” and like “ascending to Valhalla” for someone who read The Times as a young girl growing up in New York. “We are held together by our passion for our work, our friendship and our deep belief in the mission and indispensability of The Times,” she said. “I look forward to working with all of you to seize our future. In this thrilling and challenging transition, we will cross to safety together.”

The selection of Ms. Abramson is something of a departure for The Times, an institution that has historically chosen executive editors who ascended the ranks through postings in overseas bureaus and managing desks like Foreign or Metro.

Ms. Abramson came to The Times in 1997 from The Wall Street Journal, where she was  a deputy bureau chief and an investigative reporter for nine years. She rose quickly at The Times, becoming Washington editor in 1999 and then bureau chief in 2000. She stepped aside temporarily from her day-to-day duties as managing editor last year to help run The Times’s online operations, a move she asked to make so she could develop fuller, firsthand experience with the integration of the digital and print staffs.

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Legal Outsourcing Firms Creating Jobs for American Lawyers

Top American firms have cut hiring or moved to a lower-tier pay system for many new associates. Corporations are reducing their legal departments. Legal temp companies now pay as little as $20 a hour to board-certified lawyers for document reviews that a decade ago might have been billed at $200 an hour.

But there is at least one glimmer of light. And it comes from a surprising direction.

Outsourcing firms, the companies that in recent years added to the financial woes of the American legal profession by sending work to low-cost countries like India, are now creating jobs for lawyers in the United States.

The American salaries for outsourced work, typically in the $50,000 to $80,000 range, may look meager compared with the six figures that new associates might still hope to draw at a big firm. But outsourcing jobs typically pay better than temp work — and certainly better than no work at all.

And at that salary range, American lawyers start to look a bit more competitive with their offshore counterparts — and more attractive to potential American clients that might not be comfortable sending legal work overseas.

“If we’re going to deliver a fantastic client experience, the only way to do it is to have an onshore facility,” said Sanjay Kamlani, co-chief executive of Pangea3, a legal outsourcing firm with offices in New York and Mumbai.

Pangea3, which was bought by Thomson Reuters in November, has just opened a 400-seat office in Carrollton, Tex., a Dallas suburb. The new office means Pangea3 will have lawyers working during United States business hours, on tasks that, because of logistics or American law, can be difficult to perform outside the country — like writing and vetting export control documents, military contracts and some patent reviews.

Many of Pangea3’s main competitors are already doing legal work in the United States and have been hiring steadily in recent months. And though the industry’s total number of employees in the United States is still estimated to be only in the hundreds, analysts predict fast growth for the field.

Because legal outsourcing companies grew steadily during the recession as corporations trimmed legal staffs, the industry was able to attract investors like Thomson Reuters and Intermediate Capital Group. Now legal outsourcing companies and others are opening offices and hiring lawyers in lower-cost areas in the United States, like West Virginia and North Dakota.

Legal outsourcing companies employ about 16,000 people worldwide, according to Edward Brooks, founder of the LPO Program, which matches legal outsourcing companies with potential clients.

The industry made an estimated $400 million in revenue in 2010, according to the researcher The Datamonitor Group, which was just a tiny fraction of the world’s $200-billion-a-year legal market. But Datamonitor predicts legal outsourcing revenues will grow to $2.4 billion by 2012, based on the industry’s recent rapid expansion. In part because of the harsh economic climate of the last few years, “the reality is that the United States and the United Kingdom have many lower-cost locations and good supplies of legal professionals,” said Mark Ross, a vice president at Integreon, an outsourcing company based in Los Angeles.

Integreon has lawyers and paralegals in 17 offices around the world, including India and South Africa. But the company, which is now hiring lawyers and other legal professionals in its Fargo, N.D., and Bristol, England, offices, currently has about 500 employees in the United States and expects to have 600 by the end of the year.

In the United States, outsourcing companies are hiring lawyers from temporary legal services firms or recruiting them directly out of law school. The pay is often comparable to lawyers’ salaries in smaller cities. And the jobs can come with other benefits, like equity stakes in the company and management opportunities that might not be widely available at conventional law firms.

Lily Liu joined Pangea3’s new Texas office after six years as a temporary lawyer and previous experience as a trial lawyer in Texas.

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