The event on Dec. 5 took place in the 11th-floor boardroom of the Brooklyn Supreme Court, Civil Term. Nearly 40 of Brooklyn’s judges and attorneys, all members of the BWBA, sat in with Marks for an hour. The judges talk about various topics, ranging from background about themselves to what is the latest developments happening in their courthouse, during Lunch with a Judge events.

Marks discussed parts of his own career as well as Chief Judge Janet DiFiore’s Excellence Initiative. After, he answered questions from the roughly 40 people in attendance.

“Our No. 1 top priority, which the chief judge announced in her first day in office, is the Excellence Initiative,” said Marks. “It’s such a broad nomenclature that can include everything and will certainly evolve over time. The focus on the Excellence Initiative has been on making the court system more efficient and to provide the highest quality service we can to the public.”

Marks admitted that Brooklyn, being the largest court system in the state, often offers its own set of issues that other counties, including other counties in New York City, don’t have to deal with. Still, he pointed out, Brooklyn has seen massive improvements under the Excellence Initiative.

“I want to congratulate Judge Lawrence Knipel, the other judges in this court, the court staff and the practitioners,” Marks said. “Over the last two years now there has been tremendous progress in this court. There have been changes that have yielded positive results.

“The number of cases over standards and goals has gone down about 35 percent over the last 18 months or so,” Marks continued. “There is a lot more work to do, we’re not declaring victory yet, but that’s tremendous progress.”

Marks then spoke about how he and DiFiore thought that the court system missed out on an opportunity to make positive changes through the state constitutional convention, that was voted down in the most recent election.

“Obviously the voting public was wary of it, but we thought it was an opportunity to address structural problems,” Marks said.

DiFiore had even created a task force to come up with recommended guidelines if a state constitutional convention had passed. She has now changed that task force to one that will recommend changes to the state Legislature.

“What we’re trying to do with the Excellence Initiative is in a lot of ways hampered by these archaic rules that we would have had the opportunity to change, but now we have to turn to the Legislature.”

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