BILLINGS — Every day, newly appointed District Court Judge Seth Cunningham crosses the street from his temporary chambers to the Yellowstone County courthouse.
The building doesn’t yet have space for him, so he borrows different courtrooms and packs his judge’s robe in a tote bag.
“It’s non-wrinkle,” he joked.
Cunningham’s judgeship was one of two added last year to the 13th Judicial District, which is the state’s busiest both by total volume and caseload per judge.
Even now with 10 judges, the district remains understaffed, state data show.
Alongside Cunningham, who practiced mainly civil defense at The Brown Law Firm in Billings, Gov. Greg Gianforte appointed Ed Zink, chief of criminal litigation at the Yellowstone County Attorney’s Office.
Both took the bench in late December and must run for election this fall to retain their seats.
Demand on the district has grown over the last decade, with criminal cases in particular climbing steadily.
The ballooning legal business has pushed out other county departments, and now the eight-story courthouse will be used solely for court clerks, judges and staff, and the county attorney’s office.
Zink has worked in the courthouse since 1998, first as a law clerk and later as a prosecutor.
“I thought I came into this with my eyes pretty wide open,” he said. “I was wrong.”
He said he was surprised by “the sheer pace and the never-ending inbound work” each judge faces.
Each judge handles more than a thousand cases a year and uses a software program called the “judge review queue” to track the progress of their cases. New motions pop up on their computer monitors every few minutes.
The most recent workload study, done in 2022, showed the 13th Judicial District needed four more judges than it had.
The districts next in need were the 11th in Flathead County and the 4th in Missoula and Mineral counties. Both needed two more judges.
However, the Montana Legislature in 2025 agreed to add just two new judges in Yellowstone County, and none for the other counties. Currently, a district court judge makes $159,813 a year. Additional funding is required for the judge’s staff.
To better handle the heavy caseload, District Court judges in Yellowstone County are trying something new: Half will handle civil cases and the other half will handle criminal cases. After three years, the groups will swap.
The split is meant to dodge conflicts arising from juggling both criminal and civil caseloads.
Too often in the past, criminal cases bumped civil cases out of line at the last minute, so as not to infringe on the constitutional speedy-trial rights of those accused.
Court staff and attorneys lost time preparing for trials that weren’t yet happening, and the already-lengthy lifespan of a civil case grew even longer.
To keep cases moving, the district is trying other changes. Now, judges carve out designated days of the month for child abuse and neglect work, rather than trying to schedule hearings around existing obligations.
Cunningham said the move promises a more predictable calendar for all of the attorneys, social workers and youth advocates involved.
Despite overwhelming caseloads, performance measures for Yellowstone County aren’t far off from state averages. In some recent years, they were better.
Court administrators use case clearance rates to measure whether courts are keeping up with the incoming caseload. A case clearance rate of 100% means the court is closing the same number of cases in a calendar year that were opened.
Data for the past four years shows that in the 13th Judicial District, the worst clearance rate was in 2022, when it cleared 97% of the number of incoming cases. That’s not far below the state’s lowest clearance rate of 99% in 2023.
The state also measures whether courts are closing cases in a timely manner.
In 2025, the 13th Judicial District processed 75% of cases on time, while the rest of the district courts in Montana processed 80% of cases on time. In the three prior years, the 13th Judicial District matched or outpaced the rest of the state.
Due to the state’s spread-out nature, some rural districts are overstaffed, the 2022 workload study showed, with a single judge to handle half of a regular caseload — even accounting for the extra travel time inherent in those jobs. There is no pay differential.
The 2022 workload study showed that while the state employed 53 District Court judges, it needed closer to 65 to handle all the work.
This story was originally published by Montana Free Press at montanafreepress.org.
