Court Leadership Training Programme Being Developed

The Judiciary of Jamaica is working to develop a training programme that will enhance the managerial skills of officers in leadership positions in the country’s courts.

Chief Justice, Hon. Bryan Sykes, told a Jamaica Information Service (JIS) ‘Think Tank’ that the move will streamline functions across the leadership core of the courts by equipping officers with the necessary skills to operate in these spaces.

“The Chief Justice, Chief Judge of the Parish Courts, and the President of the Court of Appeal can’t be everywhere all over Jamaica. So you have to have persons on the ground who are managing and leading those courts.

“This is where the senior judges of the parish courts come in. We have to have persons with not just the legal skill, because when you are dealing with the delivery of legal services, it’s not really a legal issue, it’s a management issue; it’s a service delivery issue,” he said.

Mr. Sykes also noted that the leadership and managerial skills required to effectively run a parish court are not always synonymous with the extensive legal training undertaken by the country’s most senior judges.

“You may have the most brilliant judge. But if the judge is appointed to manage a parish court and the judge doesn’t have the necessary skills, you’re going to have an inefficient legal system, regardless of how wonderful the judge may [operate]. The judge now is both a judge [and] a manager. Those judicial skills, wonderful though they may be, they really don’t translate necessarily into effective leadership and management of the courts. This is why we have to have the training of those persons,” he stated.

With this training programme, senior judges will be equipped with crisis management skills to handle unpredictable events that could disrupt court operations.

“They must have the ability to develop a plan to deal with whatever has unfolded. For example, when we had the fire in St. Ann, there’s nothing in law school that prepares you for that. That is not a legal question; that is a question of your ability to manage a crisis. We had the flooding of the court in St. Mary, we had the hurricane damaging St. Catherine, and the fire in Spanish Town. Those are things that the judge on the ground has to have the disposition and the mind to manage,” he said

“Each problem has its own nuances that only the person on the ground will have all the necessary information to solve. That is why we are going into the business of training the judges,” Chief Justice Sykes added.