The recession affects you in ways you can’t see
Even if you still have a good job, and are financially stable, a severe economic downturn can hit you in ways outside of your control.Let’s look at at one example.
Suppose you have some need to use the legal system; a lawsuit, divorce proceeding, or judgment claim. In many jurisdictions, the court system is clogged up with foreclosure actions, straining the dockets and judges schedules. “We’re sort of built to handle 25,000 to 35,000 cases a year,” Bailey says of Miami-Dade civil court. “We have almost 35,000 by the end of June that are foreclosures alone, out of a total of 50,000 cases filed.” Foreclosures that once took three to five months to complete in Miami-Dade and Broward counties now take nine months to one year to move from initial filing to final judgment and auction. “We have buckets and buckets of work that we do just to get ready to do the mailings,” Broward County’s Kriz Mazzeo says.
If you are a plaintiff in a judgment case, or a party to a child custody proceeding, you may not be able to get a rush 
hearing on some urgent matter. Is it possible that even restraining order hearings are delayed by the backlog? Each court has different procedures, but it is reasonable to assume that there is a lowering of the bar to what is considered urgent.
Suppose you do get a court date, you may find it difficult to get a jury. NPR reports that more people are opting out of jury duty out of financial hardship. At King County Superior Court in Seattle, jurors get paid $10 a day. “More and more now, we’re hearing from individuals [that] two days, even one day is going to be a hardship for them, that they’re not going to be able to handle that financially in any way,” says Greg Wheeler, the court’s jury manager. Patricia Powell hears firsthand what’s going on every day. Powell, a court assistant for L.A. County’s jury services, says that people asking to be excused or to postpone their jury service is nothing new, but that these days the stories are more personal. “They’ve been unemployed for quite some time, that they’re self-employed due to losing a job, they’re losing their homes. You’ve got a lot of jurors who are crying,” Powell says.
The people who do end up on your jury could be biased due to the stress. “As a trial attorney, you never want people on your jury that don’t want to be there” says David S. Kestenbaum, a criminal defense lawyer.
