The slowest judge

The data suggests the slowest judge is Lindsay Foster, a former lawyer for McDonalds Corp. The Sydney-based Justice Foster, who recently took 802 days to complete a judgment, spends an average of almost four months writing decisions after trials end, the longest stretch of any current or recent Federal Court judge.

The ranking comes at a time when judges are under scrutiny for their productivity. Barristers have expressed frustration that some judges are too slow, and don't write judgments immediately after trials end, when the evidence is fresh in their minds.

They also reinforce recent criticism of the Federal Court by retired High Court judge Dyson Heydon, who conducted his own analysis that found the court was slower than the NSW Supreme Court, and the Commercial Court and Chancery Division in London.

"It's embarrassing when you have a foreign client and it takes nine months to get a decision," said one Sydney-based Queens Counsel who specialises in commercial law.

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Three-month target

The Federal Court's nominal objective is to complete judgments within three months, but there is no formal way to require judges to meet the target. Poor productivity is not grounds for removal.


The Financial Review hired a private company in Melbourne, Scraping Solutions, to extract information from 11,000 Federal Court single-judge decisions published on the internet dating from 2009. Almost 100,000 items of data were collected, including the date each hearing finished, when the judgment was published, and the length of each judgment.

While the data doesn't include every case over the timeframe or multiple-judge appeals, it may represent one of Australia's largest independent analyses of judicial output.

The court challenged the validity of the data, which it said was "fundamentally flawed" because it doesn't take into account intangible factors such as the quality of judgments, or work with other judges hearing appeals.

"The AFR's approach is a simplistic and limited numerical analysis that fails to provide any meaningful insight into the qualitative breadth and nature of the work of the court as an institution," a court spokesman said.

The Federal Court's own data says that 7 per cent of cases take 18 months, from start to finish, and 78 per cent take less than six months.

Worse than it looks

Even though the data relies on straightforward measures – how quickly judgments are written, and how much judges write a day – it may underestimate how long the average court client has to wait for justice.

Forty per cent of the cases in the database were resolved within one day, and many were simple procedural matters such as requests for delays. If minor cases were excluded, the average waits for judgments would be much higher.


The data suggests that judges could finish their cases more quickly by better time management. After a hearing ends, the average judge writes 14 paragraphs a week of their judgments, or 181 words a day, suggesting many are trying to juggle multiple commitments.

Given the average judgment is 57 paragraphs long, the data suggests the court could operate a lot faster if judges set aside time immediately after a hearing to write their judgments.

Twenty judges averaged less than one paragraph a day. John Dowsett, who retired in 2018 after 20 years on the bench, averaged 32 words a day. One judge, James Edelman, averaged 20 paragraphs a day.

What makes a fast judge

There appears to be no pattern about what makes a slow or fast judge, including how long they have been on the court or where they live. The court's top judge, James Allsop, ranks 21st out of 69 past and present Federal Court judges based on speed of writing judgments.

Before she moved to the High Court in 2015, Michelle Gordon was one of the 10 fastest judges.

The most productive judge in recent Federal Court history was Justice Edelman, who was on the court for two years before he was promoted to the High Court last year.

Justice Edelman took on average four days to complete his judgments, and wrote 20 paragraphs a day, almost three times the next ranked judge based on daily output, Justice Colvin.


In one 2016 case, Justice Edelman wrote a 10,830-word judgment in one day, in which he overturned a decision to deny a Vietnamese couple a refugee visa after finding their testimony wasn't translated properly.

Two years, two months and two weeks

Justice Foster took two years, two months and two weeks to write a 20,343-word judgment that was published in July. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had asked him to find that family members of corrupt former Labor politician Eddie Obeid and others rigged a mining licence sale.

He rejected the ACCC's case and the regulator has appealed the decision. A source outside the court said Justice Foster had been diagnosed with cancer. A court spokesman declined to comment.

In his critique of the court, Justice Heydon said judgments should not take longer than a year. "This is fairly universally regarded as totally unsatisfactory," he recently told the HR Nichols Society.