Court Opinion

ID: 9568031
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:00:07.84948+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:24:16.959861
License: Public Domain

ORME, Judge,
dissenting in part:
I concur fully in the court’s opinion, except that I must dissent from the majority’s ringing endorsement of the administrative law judge’s delegation to prevailing counsel of the important task of drafting findings of fact and conclusions of law. As far as I am aware, this has not been the contemporary practice of law-trained administrative law judges in this state.1 On the contrary, Utah ALJs generally — and those adjudicating workers compensation cases in particular— have routinely prepared their own findings and conclusions. Their work product has, with rare exceptions, been excellent, not only because findings prepared by the actual fact finder are inherently better than those prepared by a nonneutral delegee one step removed from decisional responsibility,2 see *988generally United States v. El Paso Natural Gas Co., 376 U.S. 651, 656 & n. 4, 84 S.Ct. 1044, 1047 & n. 4, 12 L.Ed.2d 12 (1964), but also because continual feedback from the Industrial Commission and from this court, as well as the skill that comes with repetition and practice, help insure findings that are sufficiently detailed and otherwise “more helpful to the appellate court.” Id, at 656, 84 S.Ct. at 1047.
While it is true that custom, workload, and lack of staff have combined to make delegation to counsel more the norm in the district courts of this state, this approach is more a necessary evil than a model to be emulated. See generally Automatic Control Prods. Corp. v. Tel-Tech, Inc., 780 P.2d 1258, 1263-64 (Utah 1989) (Zimmerman, J., concurring in the 'result). Indeed, whether due to increased availability of law clerks, providing judges with personal computers, a change in the local legal culture, or some combination of factors, we are seeing increasing numbers of cases where the findings of fact are simply included in a memorandum decision prepared by the trial judge. Especially given this commendable trend, it would be a shame if ALJs for state administrative boards and agencies were to reverse direction and begin regularly delegating the responsibility to counsel. Hopefully Judge George’s delegation here was only a fluke or an experiment. In any event, I, for one, would not wish to encourage any expansion of the practice.

. In this regard, it should be noted that the Erkman case, cited in the main opinion as approving an administrative body’s delegation to counsel of the responsibility for preparing findings of fact, involved a local administrative board whose members were not law-trained. See Erkman v. Civil Serv. Comm'n of Provo, 114 Utah 228, 236, 198 P.2d 238, 242 (1948) ("The commissioners, generally being laymen, are not ordinarily skilled in preparing papers of this kind, and when the drawing of findings of fact by counsel for the prevailing party might be a relatively simple matter, the same matter might be extremely difficult for members of the commission.").

. Judge J. Skelly Wright, in rather passionate terms, identified "the primary purpose” for having trial judges prepare their own findings, while at the same time staking out his view of the import of Rule 52 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure:
Who shall prepare the findings? Rule 52 says the court shall prepare the findings. "The *988court shall find the facts specifically and state separately its conclusions of law.” We all know what has happened. Many courts simply decide the case in favor of the plaintiff or the defendant, have him prepare the findings of fact and conclusions of law and sign them. This has been denounced by every court of appeals save one. This is an abandonment of the duty and the trust that has been placed in the judge by these rules. It is a noncompli-anee with Rule 52 specifically and it betrays the primary purpose of Rule 52 — the primary purpose being that the preparation of these findings by the judge shall assist in the adjudication of the lawsuit.
United States v. El Paso Natural Gas Co., 376 U.S. 651, 656 n. 4, 84 S.Ct. 1044, 1047 n. 4, 12 L.Ed.2d 12 (1964) (quoting Seminars for Newly Appointed United States District Judges 166 (1963)).