Rule 14.0 Allotment of Cases

When you get a criminal case filed in a Louisiana district court, it doesn't get picked by a judge or assigned on purpose. Instead, the clerk of court assigns it randomly to a judge. This keeps the process fair and prevents anyone from choosing which judge handles a case. Each court has its own written method for doing this random assignment, which is spelled out in an appendix to the rules.

Traffic tickets, wildlife violation cases, and appeals from lower courts (like city or parish courts) also get assigned randomly, but they follow a separate method described in a different appendix.

If a district has a special drug court set up to handle drug cases faster, those cases skip the normal random assignment process. Instead, they all go straight to the drug court. If that drug court has multiple judges or divisions, the clerk still randomly assigns the case to one of those divisions, using the same random method used for other cases. This rule doesn't apply to drug courts created under a specific separate law (R.S. 13:5301), which may have their own rules for assigning cases.