Dueling memos: Civil Justice Council responds to lawmaker’s letter to budget-writing panel

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The Wisconsin Civil Justice Council isn’t backing down on statements it made about the separate, policy-recommending Judicial Council in a recent memo to lawmakers on the state’s budget-writing committee

The Civil Justice Council, a group of business organizations and trade groups that bills itself as working to promote fairness in the state’s civil justice system, sent the state’s budget-writing committee a memo on May 21 saying it was opposed to any attempt to direct resources to the Judicial Council, which it deemed “an arm of the plaintiff’s bar.”

The Judicial Council is a 21-member independent body that studies and proposes changes to court procedures and policies.

The memo came in response to discussions during a May 17 meeting in which members proposed that Judicial Council could be attached to another nonpartisan agency so that it would again have resources that it had lost two years ago, when then-Gov. Scott Walker eliminated the Judicial Council’s budget and staff attorney.

Various Judicial Council members responded, including state Senator Van Wanggaard, who sent his own memo to the committee, calling the Civil Justice Council’s memo a “mistake-filled attack” and asking the committee to ignore it.

On Friday, the Wisconsin Civil Justice Council sent another memo to the state’s budget-writing committee, challenging Wanggaard’s memo and saying it had “significant mistakes and undocumented claims.”

The Wisconsin Civil Justice Council attached documents to the memo supporting its claims that the council had lobbied against 2017 Wisconsin Act 235 before it was enacted, was using budget deliberations to seek additional resources and has been trying to undermine Act 235 since it took effect.

Act 235 made a slew of changes to the state’s civil-litigation rules, and the Civil Justice Council was a big supporter of that legislation. The Judicial Council had asked lawmakers to first let them study the legislation before putting it to a vote. Follow @erikastrebel