A typical court day runs from 9:00 A.M. to noon, with a fifteen-minute morning break. Courts typically resume at 2 P.M. and run until 4:30 P.M., with a fifteen-minute afternoon break. Judges may have other cases scheduled for conferences or motions that may take longer than scheduled and run into your trial time. What's more, those fifteen-minute breaks can stretch into thirty minutes or more. If the judge has an obligation after work, he may want to stop promptly at 4:30 P.M. If you're lucky, you'll have four hours of actual trial time during a court day. Of course, you'll pay for at least eight hours of attorney time!

Suppose your case is set for a two-day trial. You start late on the first day and are about sixty percent of the way through the case by the end of the second day. The judge doesn't have time to hear the rest of the testimony the following day, plus your attorney has another trial starting then. So the judge and the lawyers confer and agree to finish the trial about sixty days from now. At this rate, it may take several months to complete your trial.

After all the testimony is in, the judge has ninety days in most jurisdictions to issue a decision. Attorneys often ask for the opportunity to submit written final arguments and a proposed judgment and decree. They usually get another couple of weeks to do that. The judge's ninety days doesn't kick in until all papers have been submitted. As you can see, it's going to take some time before you actually have a ruling from the court.