What the 13th Circuit Court's 2025 Annual Report Tells You

At True North Legal Group, we help good people when bad things happen in Grand Traverse and Leelanau Counties. Most of our clients are first-time defendants facing the criminal justice system for the first time. Every January, the 13th Circuit Court publishes an annual report on how it actually operated the year before, and the 2025 report was just released. We read it closely, because the numbers tell a story about how criminal cases really move through the courts here, and what that means for someone who has just been charged.

We are a boutique, selective-docket criminal defense firm focused only on the 86th District Court and the 13th Circuit Court in these two counties. We are not a high-volume plea mill. We prepare every case as if it may go to trial. The 2025 report is, in our view, one of the clearest pieces of evidence for why that posture matters, and why a first-time defendant should ask hard questions about whether their lawyer is actually built to try a case.

This article walks through what the report says, what we think it means, and what you should take from it. The report covers Antrim, Grand Traverse, and Leelanau Counties; we keep our focus on Grand Traverse and Leelanau, but the circuit-wide numbers tell the same story. You can read the full report here: 2025 13th Circuit Court Annual Report.

What the Annual Report Is

The 13th Circuit Court has published an annual report for thirty years. It is a public document that summarizes the court's caseload and operations: how many cases were filed, how many were resolved, how they were resolved, and how much it all cost. It is not marketing and it is not advocacy. It is the court describing its own year, which is why it is worth reading. When the court itself tells you how cases end here, it is worth paying attention.

The 13th Circuit Court handles all felony criminal cases in the three counties it serves, along with major civil matters and domestic relations cases. In Grand Traverse and Leelanau Counties, a felony case starts in the 86th District Court for the early stages and, if it is bound over, moves to the 13th Circuit Court for motions, plea discussions, and any jury trial. So when the report talks about trials and dispositions, it is describing the part of the system where felony cases are actually resolved.

The Headline Number: Eight Jury Trials

In all of 2025, across all three counties, the 13th Circuit Court conducted a total of eight jury trials. Two in Antrim County, four in Grand Traverse County, and two in Leelanau County. That is every jury trial of any kind, civil and criminal combined, for the entire circuit, for the entire year.

Eight. That number is not an anomaly, and it is not trending up. The report's own five-year trend shows jury trials going the other direction:

2021: 12 jury trials
2022: 36 jury trials
2023: 23 jury trials
2024: 10 jury trials
2025: 8 jury trials

In other words, jury trials in this circuit have fallen by roughly three-quarters in three years. On the civil side, the report notes that only two civil cases in the entire circuit were resolved by jury trial all year. The courtroom trial, the thing most people picture when they imagine the justice system, has become rare here.

How Cases Actually End: Pleas

If trials are rare, how do cases end? The report answers that directly. In 2025, the 13th Circuit Court disposed of 704 criminal cases. The single largest method of resolution, by far, was the guilty plea. The court recorded 481 guilty pleas across the three counties: 63 in Antrim County, 381 in Grand Traverse County, and 37 in Leelanau County.

Sit with the Grand Traverse number for a moment. The court resolved roughly 500 criminal cases in Grand Traverse County in 2025, and about 381 of them ended in a guilty plea. The overwhelming majority of felony cases in this county are resolved not by a jury weighing the evidence, but by a plea agreement. That is the engine of the system. Pleas are how it runs.

And the volume is climbing. The report shows criminal filings up 67% over the past five years, with both new filings and total criminal caseload increasing again in 2025. More cases are entering the system every year, while the number of trials shrinks. The math is not subtle: rising caseloads plus falling trials means more pressure, on everyone, to resolve cases by plea.

What This Means If You've Been Charged

Here is the part we want first-time defendants in Grand Traverse and Leelanau Counties to understand, and we are going to say it plainly. The system around you is built to process cases by plea. That is not a conspiracy and it is not necessarily wrong. Pleas resolve cases, they save courts time, and in many cases a well-negotiated plea is genuinely the right outcome. But it does create a current, and that current runs in one direction: toward resolving your case quickly, without a trial.

Now consider what eight trials a year means for the lawyers in this region. If an entire circuit, with its judges, prosecutors, and the full local defense bar, produces only eight jury trials in a year, then the average attorney here tries vanishingly few cases. Many go years without one. Trial experience, real, recent, in-this-courthouse trial experience, is not common. It is scarce. And scarcity matters, because the lawyers who do not try cases are not a meaningful threat to take a case to trial, and prosecutors know it.

This is the uncomfortable question the report invites, and we think you should ask it out loud: does my lawyer actually try cases, or do they only resolve them? A lawyer who is genuinely prepared to put the prosecution to its proof, who has done it before and is ready to do it again, changes the conversation. A lawyer who treats every case as a plea waiting to happen has, in effect, already made your most important decision for you before the evidence is even reviewed.

We are not telling you that you should go to trial. We are telling you that the option to go to trial is leverage, and that leverage only exists if your lawyer can credibly use it. In a system that resolves 481 cases by plea and 8 by jury, the defendant whose lawyer is truly trial-ready is in a fundamentally different position than the one whose lawyer is not.

Why Trial-Readiness Helps Even If You Never Go to Trial

When we say we prepare every case as if it may go to trial, people sometimes hear bravado. It is the opposite. Trial-readiness is protection, and it works whether or not a trial ever happens.

Preparation creates options. When a case is worked from day one, when the discovery is examined carefully, when the body-camera footage is compared against the written report, when the legal issues are identified and raised through motions, the real shape of the case comes into view. In our experience, local prosecutors often overcharge, and the file on paper does not always match the evidence in court. A case that looked airtight in the police report can look very different once it is actually prepared.

That preparation is exactly what gives a plea discussion its value. A plea offered to a lawyer who is ready to try the case is usually a better plea than one offered to a lawyer who is not. The same work that prepares a case for trial also produces the strongest possible position for negotiation. So when the report shows that almost everything ends in a plea, our response is not to stop preparing for trial. It is to prepare harder, because preparation is what makes a plea a real choice instead of a foregone conclusion.

Questions to Ask Any Lawyer in This Region

If you take one practical thing from the 2025 report, let it be this: before you hire anyone, ask the questions the numbers make obvious.

How many cases have you actually taken to trial, and how recently?
Have you tried cases in the 86th District Court and the 13th Circuit Court specifically?
If we cannot reach a fair resolution, are you prepared to try this case, and what would that look like?
How will you prepare my case before we ever talk about a plea?
Will you review the actual evidence, including any video, against the police report before advising me?

There are no wrong answers to ask about. But the answers you hear will tell you a great deal about whether you are talking to a lawyer who resolves cases or a lawyer who is also genuinely willing and able to try them.

A Fair Word About Pleas

We want to be careful here, because this is a place where it is easy to overstate. The fact that most cases end in a plea is not proof that the system is broken, and it is not a sign that you should reject every offer on principle. Many pleas are good outcomes. Many are the right outcome. A plea can protect you from risk, limit consequences, and let you move forward with your life. For a lot of first-time defendants, a carefully negotiated resolution is the best result available, and we have helped many clients reach exactly that.

The point is not that trials are good and pleas are bad. The point is that a plea should be a decision you make from a position of preparation and information, not a default you accept because the process feels overwhelming and everyone around you seems to expect it. The 2025 report shows a system that defaults to pleas. Our job is to make sure your case is one where the plea, if there is one, is a real choice.

How We Work, and What to Do Now

We take a small number of cases on purpose. We focus only on the 86th District Court and the 13th Circuit Court in Grand Traverse and Leelanau Counties, and we prepare each case from the beginning as if it may be tried. That is not because we think every case should be tried. It is because that posture protects your options, and the 2025 numbers are a reminder of how few lawyers actually maintain it.

If you have been arrested or charged in Grand Traverse or Leelanau County, the most important thing you can do is get oriented early, before decisions start getting made for you. Read the court's own report if you want to understand the landscape. Then talk to a lawyer who can tell you, honestly, whether they are prepared to stand between you and a system that is built to move you toward a plea.

You can read the full 2025 13th Circuit Court Annual Report here: 2025 13th Circuit Court Annual Report (PDF).