By Dan McCue

A new and more efficient way of managing the state court system’s growing business docket could be set into motion as early as mid-September and will likely be authorized by S.C. Chief Justice Jean Hoefer Toal.

The trailblazing Toal, the first woman and Roman Catholic to serve as the state’s chief justice, told the Charleston Regional Business Journal, sister publication of SCBIZ, she hopes to sign the order creating a pilot “business court” within the next few weeks.

Once she takes that step, Charleston, Richland and Greenville would be the first communities to put the case management system into practice.

Toal said she and a task force including lawyers, judges and business community members have been working for a long time on creating a specialized business docket in the circuit court. The program would streamline the process by which often-complex business-related disputes are handled, added Toal, who has been the state’s chief justice since March 2000.
Toal likened the pilot program to the North Carolina Business Court, a specialized forum of the North Carolina State Courts’ trial division. 

Cases involving complex and significant issues of corporate and commercial law in the Tar Heel state are assigned by the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court to a special Superior Court judge who oversees resolution of all matters in the case through trial.

“They’ve had that system in place a good many years now, and it really seems to work quite well,” Toal said. “We have taken a lot of good advice from our sister state to the North.”

The chief justice said many more business cases are likely to be settled out of court if, as she expects, the system she envisions administers the cases in an “expedited and sensible way.”

In effect, the program will create a one-stop shop for business litigation beginning in pre-trial and continuing through discovery, motions and the actual trying of the case.

“If you organize your docket in such a way that one judge handles the whole thing, the benefits—not only to the litigants, but (to) the system as a whole—are consistency and an administration of cases that doesn’t allow any of them to fall through the cracks,” Toal said.