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NEWS RELEASE
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Contact:
The contract provides for a part-time executive director, assistance with conference planning, membership management, financial planning, liaison with other judicial administration groups, and technology assistance such as Web site development, explained Mary McQueen, the Center’s president. “We are very pleased to serve urban trial court leaders in this new way, and look forward to a long and productive partnership,” McQueen added. “The times have changed,” Rufus King, III, Chief Judge of the District of Columbia Superior Court and chairman of the NCMC Board said in announcing the new arrangement. “We must boost the ability of the Conference to better serve the nation’s busiest presiding judges and administrators, grow the organization, and address ever more complex problems confronting urban courts in new and more productive ways.” The National Center for State Courts is the principal research, consulting and education think-tank serving state courts in the United States. According to the Center, there are 16,000 trial courts in the United States and only a handful serve the metropolitan population of the country. Not surprisingly, the metropolitan courts account for more than eighty percent of all case volume ranging from traffic matters to murder cases, and small claims to intellectual property disputes. Metropolitan courts are organized around city, county or regional boundaries and have multiple judges and large court staffs often serving millions of people. The 25 largest urban areas in America account for 42 percent of the nation’s 303+ million people ranging from 18.8 million in the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island region to Cincinnati-Middletown at 2.1 million based on the latest census data as of July 1, 2006. Kathy Hardcastle, Presiding Judge of the Eighth Judicial District Court in Clark County Nevada and this year’s president of the National Conference of Metro Courts, was instrumental in putting the agreement together, along with Jack Komar, past chairman of the NCMC Board and a former presiding judge at the Santa Clara County California Superior Court. Hardcastle’s court will be the first benefactor of the contract as the Center provides assistance in hosting the NCMC 45th Annual Meeting and Education Session in Las Vegas February 19-22, 2008. “The National Center has already started to make a difference by helping us develop our education program around the theme ‘Leading Trial Courts in Dangerous Times.’ A new feature this year will be two special, in-depth seminars targeting trial court leadership and courthouse design created by the Institute for Court Management which will front-ending the annual meeting and add a new learning dimension we have not had to date,” said Hardcastle. For more information about the National Conference of Metropolitan Courts, its members, programs and educational conferences, contact Association Services at the National Center for State Courts, (800) 616-6165, or contact the new NCMC executive director, Gordon Griller, former trial court administrator in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Phoenix, Arizona. Mr. Griller also serves as the Director of Trial Court Leadership Programs for the National Center for State Courts and can be reached at (757) 259-1883. ###
National Center for State Courts, 300 Newport Avenue, Williamsburg, VA 23185-4147 |
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