This is the nature of any non-trivial litigation. It can take a long time just to source all the records of what's being argued over, then it takes a long time to argue over what's allowed, then a long time to argue what all of it means, then a long time to argue over which laws, jurisdictions and precedents apply, then a long time to figure out when the judge (who is juggling >1000 cases) can fit you in, then your legal counsel is on vacation, then the complaint gets amended and you have to reevaluate everything you've been fighting over for the past half decade, repeating much of the above, then opposition replaces their counsel (that's a 60 day pause), then the judge dies from old age, and then finally everybody forgets about it because space has expanded so much since you started the case that nobody can communicate anymore and the universe is going into heat death.

Kafka was trained as an attorney, after all.

The court system is designed to optimize throughput at the expense of latency, against the background of a system where authority is vested in a relatively small number of presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed constitutional officers. About 350,000 civil cases and 65,000 criminal cases are filed every year, spread out across less than 700 district court judges.

To maximize throughput, proceedings are structured like batch processing systems. You submit work, it waits in the queue until the system gets to it, some intermediate decision is rendered, and then you submit some more work. For constitutional reasons, criminal cases cut in line, which can further increase the latency of civil cases. That means that, in a four-year case, the lawyers don't actually work on the case for four years straight. They do batches of work a couple of months at a time, and then work on other cases while waiting for the output.

Moreover, court case are, to a degree, inherently serial. Motions to dismiss--briefs that argue a case must be dismissed because its legally defective--must be filed before you start deposing witnesses or exchanging documents. You generally need to do depositions of witnesses after you've reviewed all the relevant documents. And all the fact gathering must be done before you file summary judgment motions--briefs that argue a case can be decided on the factual record without a trial.[1]

Part of the inherent delay is that the legal system is already an "exception path" in the ordinary course of business. A lot of time is spent waiting for people outside your organization who don't work for you. For example, when you're deposing a witness, they have work responsibilities, vacation plans, etc., and everyone has to work around that.

It's possible to structure cases where everything can be done in a year. That's what happens at the International Trade Commission, for example. Arbitration proceedings can also be structured like that.

[1] This also means that legal teams aren't very big. Massive corporate cases with billions of dollars on the line are handled with core teams of a dozen or so lawyers--with maybe another dozen or two parachuting in to help with specific phases like trial. Technology was squeezed out a lot of the parallelizable work. The days of 20 junior attorneys sitting in rooms reviewing boxes of paper documents are gone.

> what on earth could they be continuously doing for four years?

It’s not continuous. Court time in particular is a scarce resource. Many people are involved in complex litigation, and for almost all of those people it is not their only project / job.

> My guess is that it's like a poorly run software project: mostly empty, where Person X is blocked waiting on the output of Person Y for weeks, and so on.

Correct but the off times aren’t empty; the lawyers and staff simply pick up one of the other hundreds of tasks in front of them while they wait.

When I was still at a firm, several of our clients were fighting off investigations related to the Bermudan loss harvesting scheme that started in the 1980s. The investigations started in 2003 and weren't resolved until 2013.

> Am I the only one who thinks it's totally bonkers that a lawsuit can outlast a 4 year presidential administration?

I take it you've never been party to a civil lawsuit between business entities or with the government.