“Petitions to Watch” in OT06

We thought it would be useful to look back at the blog’s Petitions to Watch feature and corresponding “Conference Call” column for Legal Times. All of the petitions we featured – along with the several hundred cert. documents filed in many of the cases – can be found at this webpage.

It was obviously a slow term. The Court granted only 56 cases in the 12 months between July of 2006 and June of 2007; according to statistics from the Harvard Law Review, that’s the lowest number of paid grants over any year in the Court’s modern history. For more on OT06’s record-low docket, see this post.

While we don’t yet have an exact count of how many paid cases were considered over the past 12 months, it looks to be roughly 1600-1700 cases; that means that somewhere in the neighborhood of 3% of the paid cases the Court considered were granted. Tom flagged 47 of those, or about 84%, as potential grants. (Two didn’t make it onto the published lists as a result of logistical snafus.) Nineteen paid cases were CVSG’d in the same time span; we had 15 on the list, for 79%.

An additional 14 pauper cases were granted this Term. While we don’t track those cases as part of our regular coverage – it’s logistically next-to-impossible given the volume – we did try to spotlight a number that looked like they were going to be seriously considered.

Ultimately, we featured 223 petitions – about 13% of the paid cases. As noted, 47 were granted, for a grant rate of 21%, while another 15 (7%) were sent to the SG. 16 additional cases were held, GVR’d, settled, withdrawn, or not denied for any reason – another 7%. Finally, 143 of our 223 cases were eventually denied (64%).

The Court’s calendar affected the success of the predictions. For instance, in late April/early May the Court went through a dry spell: the two consecutive Conferences of April 27 and May 10 produced no grants and 1 paid CVSG. Accordingly, all 13 noted petitions from those two Conferences were denied. On the other hand, our lists for Conferences in December and January (when the Court needed cases to fill its calendar) approached a grant rate of 50%: for the December 7 Conference, we featured 6 cases, 3 of which were granted; on January 5, we featured 18 cases, 8 of which were granted and 1 of which was CVSG’d; and on January 19, we featured 8 cases, 4 of which were granted.

How does all of this compare to what we expected when we introduced this feature? In some ways, we were quite accurate: Tom thought that we would predict 80-90% of the grants, and we did hit 84%. He also noted that, based on past history, roughly 210 cases would meet his criteria (13%), which was basically true (223 cases). But the one thing he did not predict was the even more extreme docket crunch. “About 70 grants will emerge from that group of 210,” we predicted last September when this feature was introduced; the truth is, however, that even with a 100% success rate, we would have only spotted 56 paid grants.

Last, but definitely not least, we want to acknowledge the continued assistance of the many attorneys and legal assistants involved in these cases who were able to send us the documents for us to post on the blog; we literally could not have done this project without cooperation from everyone we spoke with. We look forward to being in touch with many of you once again for the OT07 edition of “Petitions to Watch.”