Thomas is a Judge in Indiana’s Madison County Circuit Court 5. He presides over all types of cases, from small claims to multi-billion dollar civil complaints and criminal proceedings. In his 29 years on the bench Thomas has seen the number of court cases more than double in his county. His key to a long, prosperous career is “98% perspiration and 2% everything else.”
Transcript
Good morning, my name's Tom Clem, and I'm the judge in the Madison County Indiana Circuit Court Division Five. I have a unique array of cases. I go all the way from the small claims, a relatively routine case, all the way to very very complex civil litigation. I'm presiding over a case right now that involves a genetic seed corn company that's headquartered in Bern, Switzerland. It involves several countries, it's a multinational litigation, it's a 3 billion dollar case. And then on the criminal side, obviously I suffer from what most criminal law judges suffer from and that's the opiod crisis. The case loads are exploding, so there's a lot of challenges. First off, in a case like Syngenta, you have some of the finest lawyers in the country. And they all make very compelling arguments. It requires the judge to do a lot of work, a lot of research, in order to come to a decision that at least, myself as a judge, feels would pass muster on appeal. Because I made the assumption, regardless of what I do in a case this large, there's going to be an appeal. So I want to create the best record I can, I want to create the best platform I can, to allow the lawyers to practice their craft and if they want to present this to the appellate process they can. So that's number one. As to the roots of the law and the arguments that are being made, and the application of the law to the facts, that's something that just takes a lot of years of experience. And then as far as the day to day goes, I can tell you this. I got elected judge in 1990. At the time, the court that preside in had about 2700 civil cases, and 200 felony cases. Today, the same court presides over 4 to 500 felony cases a year, and we oftentimes go past 5000 civil cases. So to say, sufficive to say, the case loads have ballooned.
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