Plaidophile

Apparently, in most of California (and in most states in general), jury summons work by them saying exactly what day and time you'll be reporting on, and you may or may not go before a selection committee. San Francisco works a bit differently, however; you are given a summons for a particular week and a group number, and the night before every business day there is a lottery for which groups must report the next day, so potential jurors have to check a website or call in to find out if their group has been called for the next day.

I can see the principle of why they do it this way; different court cases take different amounts of time, and the courts can only serve a certain number of cases (and thus juries) in any given day. In some respects, the daily lottery eliminates a form of waste, because they only have to call in enough jurors to cover the available slots for the next day (so if there's 10 slots and 5 of them are already spoken for, they only have to select 5 groups for the next day). So in principle it makes sense from an efficiency standpoint.

In practice, however, it causes a lot more waste. When I get a summons for "the week of May 18," it means that I cannot commit to anything for that week more than a day in advance. We have a lot of meetings which need to be planned in advance, often fairly urgent (design meetings, code reviews, candidate interviews, client spec reviews, etc.) and if I knew that I was going to be selected specifically on Thursday, then I'd be able to say categorically that I am not available on Thursday, and that I may not be available on Friday, but that Monday through Wednesday are perfectly fine. But with this two-stage lottery I can't commit to anything because I simply don't know when I'll be out of the office. I could get picked on Monday, I could get picked on Friday, or I could even not get picked at all. As a result, I spend a lot more time being unproductive than I otherwise would while waiting at the courthouse.

Also, the supposed efficiency of San Francisco's approach doesn't actually generate any additional efficiency; in the end, the same number of jury groups ends up going unselected, it's just that they're left over at the end of the week instead of each day. So from a practical standpoint it really just generates additional waste.

And of course, since most of the people responsible for scheduling things don't live in San Francisco, I find myself having to keep on re-explaining this every time I get a meeting invite for Friday and I have to reply "tentative."