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A good friend claims his ambition is to become the nation’s leading Third Amendment lawyer. The Third Amendment to the United States Constitution is the one prohibiting the peacetime quartering of soldiers in private houses without the consent of the owner.

The quartering of English soldiers was one of the immediate causes of the American Revolution. It imposed a financial burden on homeowners, who had to feed their unwanted boarders. It forced members of afflicted families to live on top of each other. And it left them at the mercy of young men with guns, with everything that implies.

But while experience made our Founding Fathers believe the Third Amendment was vital to the formation of the new nation, it turned out that democracy itself provided a total cure for the ill. No elected official in the baby United States would have dreamed of advocating the king’s despised policy. And so the Third Amendment has never been more than a quaint reminder of days gone by, the legal equivalent of a Currier & Ives print.

Another core protection of the Bill of Rights is now following the Third Amendment into obsolescence. The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to trial by jury in civil cases in federal court “where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars.” The New Mexico Constitution likewise guarantees a right to jury trial in civil cases in state court. But the civil jury trial is very nearly a relic of the past.

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(In this context, “civil” just means “not criminal.” Any lawsuit for money is civil.)

In the years before World War II, fully 20 percent of all trials in American courts were civil jury trials. Today, the figure is 2 percent for federal courts and less than 1 percent for state courts, according to the National Constitution Center.

In New Mexico, “less than 1 percent” means “a whole lot less.” Figures from the Administrative Office of the Courts show that the number of civil jury trials in New Mexico state courts, expressed as a percentage of all trials, varies from one-fifth to one-tenth of 1 percent.

Last year, 15,250 civil cases were filed or reopened in Bernalillo County District Court, not including family law cases. (There are no juries in divorce cases.) Of that vast number, just 24 proceeded to the empaneling of a jury.

Ten Bernalillo County district judges exclusively hear civil cases. Their caseloads are huge, but presiding over a jury trial comes as a change of pace for them.

The long-term political trends responsible for the disappearing civil jury trial are subtle and ironic as power within the courtroom has shifted decisively from the jury (democracy in miniature) to the judge (royalty in miniature). But the immediate cause for the disappearance is more readily explained: $$$. Once upon a time, cases went to trial within months or even weeks of being filed. Now pretrial maneuvering and wrangling goes on for years. And it is outrageously expensive.

The source of greatest expense is the series of pretrial procedures known collectively as “discovery.” News reports typically describe discovery as the exchange of information, which is accurate so far as it goes. But discovery is much more than that, too.

It used to be that civil litigators examined witnesses in front of juries. Now they examine witnesses in private conference rooms, a procedure peculiarly known as a “deposition.” (I think the etymological idea is that testimony is deposited with the court.)

Depositions used to be regarded as previews of courtroom testimony. Now they have become a substitute for it. Discovery cannot realistically be viewed as preparation or rehearsal for an event as unlikely to occur as a jury trial. Instead, discovery has itself become the main event, providing the basis for the important decisions by lawyers, judges and parties. A civil litigator might take a hundred depositions before ever cross-examining a witness before a jury.

Discovery is also useful as a means for parties to impose costs on each other by making unreasonable demands, then running to the judge for expensive hearings on motions to compel discovery, knowing they will have accomplished their purpose whichever way the judge rules.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently revised the rules of civil procedure in an effort to rein in such abuses, but unfortunately did so by adding a vague and subjective standard of “proportionality” guaranteed to create new issues to litigate while producing inconsistent results.

For business people, the sad reality is that it’s hard to remain in operation for long without eventually facing the threat of a civil lawsuit, or the necessity of suing. If and when the dreaded day occurs, bringing with it the first wave of strong emotion (for litigation is nothing if not emotional), it will feel like the start of a fight, a battle, a war. But the statistics say something else: It’s really just a stage in negotiations.

Lawyers frequently talk about what a case is “worth,” by which they mean, in simplified terms, the dollar amount of provable damages discounted by the likelihood the plaintiff will lose, taking into consideration the cost of continued litigation. If the two sides can agree within a range what the case is worth, they should be able to work out a settlement well before trial, saving everybody time, stress and money while eliminating risk. That, in a nutshell, is why the constitutional right to a civil jury trial is becoming obsolete.

But if the nearly certain endpoint of civil litigation is a negotiated settlement, what’s the point of litigating at all? That’s a question every business person involved in litigation should always keep in the front of his or her mind. Once the point of litigation ceases to be obvious, it’s time for the litigators to step aside and the deal-makers to take over.

Joel Jacobsen is an author and has recently retired from a 29-year legal career If there are topics you would like to see covered in future columns, please write him at legal.column.tips@gmail.com