Availability questions

To ask a judge about availability, ask two things: are they taking commissions, and roughly what turnaround looks like right now. Do not ask to book a slot. "Are you free" has a one-sentence answer; "can I book a slot" has none yet, because nothing has been scoped.

What to actually ask

Whether they are taking commissions and what turnaround looks like are quick, honest questions a judge can answer without doing any work first, and both tell you what you actually need before writing a brief. What does not work is asking to reserve a slot, a day, or a place in the queue before the judge knows what the job is - there is nothing to hold open yet, because length and register are what determine how long a commission actually takes, and neither exists until you send a brief.

Why the order matters

Scheduling only makes sense once there is something to schedule. A judge asked to promise a slot before a brief exists is being asked to commit blind, and the honest answer to that is "send the brief and I'll tell you," which is not evasiveness, it is the correct order of operations. This mirrors the reason prices cannot be given before a brief either - a queue position and a quote are both answers to "how big is this job," and the job has to exist first.

Reading the answer

A judge who says their books are open is telling you nothing more than that they are taking requests; it is not a promise about speed. Rate Cock shows a judge's current status on their profile for exactly this reason - so the question can often be answered before you send a single message. A judge who says they are closed or booked out is not rejecting you, and pausing availability is a normal way a judge manages workload and has nothing to do with any particular buyer. Either answer, send the brief once you have one, and let the actual quote carry the turnaround estimate, which will be far more accurate than anything given before the judge has seen what you are asking for.

A rough turnaround answer given before a brief is also just less reliable, and it is worth treating it that way rather than holding a judge to a number given without the details that actually set it. "A few days, usually" from an open judge is closer to a mood than a promise, because the real estimate depends on where your specific request lands once it is written down - a short, simple ask can jump a longer queue in practice, and a demanding one can sit longer than the stated average. None of that is the judge being vague on purpose; it is the same reason a price cannot be quoted before a brief exists, just applied to time instead of money. Treat an early availability answer as a starting point for whether to bother writing the brief at all, not as a delivery date you can hold anyone to later.

Where this fits with everything else

This is a small, low-stakes question and it is worth asking plainly rather than working around - a direct "are you taking commissions right now" reads as ordinary professional contact, the same way it would read to an automated tool posting its own capacity or estimated processing time up front, just without a status page to check first. Plain wording matters more in writing than it feels like it should: across five experiments, Kruger and colleagues (2005) found people overestimate how well their tone comes across over email, so a hedged or jokey availability question can read very differently to the judge than it did to you. If speed matters more than usual, that is worth a separate, honest line rather than folding it into the availability question - asking for a faster turnaround is its own small skill, best kept apart from simply finding out whether a judge is working at all. For comparison, an algorithmic tool has no availability question at all, since it is on demand by design, which is one more point in favour of the automated route if timing is the thing you actually cannot compromise on. And if a judge's turnaround genuinely does not fit what you need this time, that is a fine reason to check what a measurement-based tool can give you instead rather than push a human judge to move faster than they said they could.