Legal proceedings often move at a glacial pace. If you’re a litigant, you have to accept that.
But there are steps you can take if a judge or a clerk has failed to make a decision or a ruling within a reasonable amount of time.
The key case on “judicial inaction” is Zatsky v. Zatsky, decided by the Appeals Court in 1994.
The pertinent section of that opinion, reads as follows:
How parties may alleviate unreasonable delay. In this case the subject of what can be done to avoid unreasonable delays falls into two categories: judge delay and clerk delay.
Some reasonable forbearance must be shown by counsel if decisions or findings do not issue from a judge as quickly as one might wish. As we have observed, case load and moving from trial assignment to trial assignment can delay a case. So can peculiar complexities of a case, the pendency of a potentially decisive case in an appellate court, supervening priorities, illness, and weather. If a decision seems overdue, the first step a litigant can take is to make inquiry of the trial judge, directly, or through the register’s or clerk’s office. The risks that a litigant who does so will incur conscious or unconscious retribution by an offended judge are greatly overstated. A conscientious judge would not be offended. More formal measures are available as next steps. A litigant may make a demand for action with the chief judge of the trial court concerned. That litigant may also petition the Supreme Judicial Court for invocation of its superintendency powers under G. L. c. 211, Section 3. Finally, a complaint in the nature of manadamus lies to compel performance of a duty by a judge.
If an appellant experiences delay in assembly of the record, a pragmatic first step is to report the problem to the clerk of the Appeals Court, the court with which the appeal would lodge in the first instance. Often a clerk to clerk (or, in this case, register of probate) communication may produce the desired expedition. The next steps, as in the case of judge delay, would be a request for intervention by the chief judge of the trial court concerned, invocation of the superintendency powers of the Supreme Judicial Court, and mandamus.
A party may also bring a motion before a single justice of the Appeals Court either to compel a clerk or register to assemble a record promptly or to waive assembly of the record as a prerequisite to entering the appeal.
The Appeals Court also adds a footnote suggesting that “a party may assist the court in the process of decision by submitting suggested findings of fact.”