Bridget McCormack

Great to be here.

Great to see you.

So the thing about being the Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court is like every state Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has administrative oversight of all the courts of the state.

And so when you're the Chief Justice, you're kind of the CEO of the public dispute resolution system that most people are stuck dealing with if they need a little justice or somebody wants a little justice from them.

Like other leadership roles, I had a leadership team, another 300 or so staff folks who reported up to the leadership team.

And it was our job to try and figure out how to improve the experience of people across the state of Michigan who had to go to their local courts because of some legal problem.

It's an enormous change management job for lots of reasons that are not true in my current job.

And the thing about running the public dispute resolution system, the state court system is complicated.

Your funding isn't based on how well you do, right?

You can't, like, perform well one year and have extra revenue for R&D.

You have to walk over to the legislature and convince some brand new representative from...

uh, Leelanau County, that, um, online dispute resolution is really going to increase access to justice.

And you literally have to like pick off legislators from around the state to try and, you know, fund what you know is going to be, um, a better way of doing business.

Um, and at the same time that the judges across the state in Michigan, there are approximately a thousand judicial officers.

I say that because in addition to judges, there are magistrates, um, that report up.

They're all separately elected.

Um,

And they work in counties that have their own funding systems.

So they're partly funded by the state.

They're partly funded by their county.