Colleen K. Sterne

If you are a lawyer and/or litigant, avoid this "judge" at all cost! The complete lack of oversight and accountability over this judicial officer have worked to allow her to transform an otherwise mundane, properly managed courtroom into nothing more than a judicial horror show. Her demeanor is disgusting. Her inability to restrain herself from engaging in inappropriate mannerisms, including but not limited to rolling her eyes, shaking her head, making inappropriate facial expressions during both jury and court trials, motions and other presentations, is entirely inexcusable. She is lazy, unprepared, arrogant, and lacks the ability to engage in any manner of appropriate judicial demeanor. She routinely engages in retaliatory behavior against both litigants and lawyers who find themselves in courtroom. One of her standard routines is an unrelenting attempt at appearing erudite, superior and an intellect. Her consistent butchery of the English language and attempts to use words and phrases she believes to be evidence of her talent and intellect fail miserably and is exhausting given the fact that those who find themselves in her courtroom are essentially held captive until their matter is called, leaving them to forced to listen to her until they are permitted to bolt from her courtroom. She should be referred to as Judge 170,6. Avoid her like the plague!! she deserves less than one star, however this cite offers no such option.

my family is going through her probate court and has been for almost a year it is my observation that she has no idea of what proffesional behavior is. She comes to court unprepared, her vibe is I would rather be anywhere but here. She holds powder over the public caring little of who she is hurting in closing I add she is a judge who does not like to make a decision.

This judge should be taken off the bench. Extremely biased against disabled beneficiaries in favor of other Santa Barbara Women’s lawyers and trust attorneys from Mullen & Henzell, Cristi Michelon Vasquez, and Quinn Fiduciary..

Having appeared before any number of highly qualified, competent Superior Court judges in Los Angeles County, it has been embarrassingly shocking to witness what in effect is a judicial horror show presided over by an incompetent, out of touch, lazy, uninformed, judicial officer with the intellect of a cabbage and personality of a worn piece of industrial carpet. I personally witnessed a bizarre performance by Santa Barbara's Judge Colleen Sterne, who regularly responded to argument and discussion by counsel with childish facial expressions, demeaning, scornful scowling, interrupted by eye rolling, head shaking, etc., the likes of which left me wondering how this person was ever permitted to practice law let alone preside over serious court proceedings. If you have the misfortune of having to appear in Santa Barbara County, be advised that you should do everything in your power to disqualify this judicial car wreck.

As a severely disabled attorney, it is shocking to me that Judge Sterne deliberately has the bailiff lock her courtroom knowing participants will be there on time and expect to get into the courtroom. Her court is not set up in any way for the disabled. She openly mocks the disabled. She has no respect for the disabled or the ADA.

This judge is bias to an extreme without truly investigating the persons situation. I don't think she has time and I think she is inherently hostile to human beings in general.

It takes 3-4 months to get a simple hearing date.Your opponents file their opposition 6 court days before the hearing. You file your reply brief one day later which this judge ignores. This is the opposite of justice. The judge has no trial dates open for a year. What a joke.

Judge Sterne is biased and unfair to the point of being entirely unethical. She schedules every matter out by at least 3 months so there is no chance of a speedy trial. Death by waiting. She is so rude and prejudiced as to make the entire process a complete mockery. Will she recuse herself due to her bias? Unlikely. There is no justice to be found in her court.

The comment below is 100% correct. This is a judge who will cut off a party from putting any object on the record yet allow the opposition to late file their pleadings to one's severe detriment. Very hateful judge. Totally biased. 100% prejudiced. Unfair. Cares not for the facts or applicable law.

Hates women. Makes litigants waits 3 months for a hearing on any motion. Cuts female litigants off at the knees and silences them if they try and put anything on the record. So narcissistic and selfish-important. Makes huge legal errors all the time, but blind to her own errors and ignorance. Awful.

This woman isn’t fit to judge a cattle call. She has obvious bias towards the attorneys who appear regularly before her[Redacted by Ed.] . She conserved my mother, on the word of two individuals who spent under one hour combined with her. My mother saw several doctors regularly who refused to state there was any mental incapacity; she was sharp until the end. The two that said Mom was senile - a hateful daughter who wasn’t allowed in the home, and the doctor she hired to claim senility. “What can it hurt to conserve her?” This foolish judge stated, while stripping my mother of her rights. What a stupid thing to say, when non-chalantly stripping a person of their rights. Mom died from fright, being put into the care of a daughter who was out to take her estate, even having written about how this daughter would surely attempt to do this when she saw a weakness. She wrote in the trust that this daughter would stop at nothing to take over everything, and asked that any judge who one day might have this issue in front of them take heed that this daughter had been attempting to take power of her money for over twenty years. A trust of 30 years was then ignored, thirty years of planning and the same wishes updated 5 times, in favor of a section of the trust which was never in effect, those wishes were shown to possibly be the desire of the deceased for 2 months. 30 years of documented estate planning, the final version of the trust maintaining the same - this judge decided to make the version of the trust that represented almost an opposing view point, and was early in in the trust revisions, and that the deceased had immediately changed back to the long standing desires which made up 100 pages and 30 years of planning, these mercurial and quickly revoked distributions were adjudicated as the deceased final wishes, despite the many amendments which came after this uncharacteristic change, which stated the familiar and constant scenario which the deceased held f

Judge Sterne allowed a cousin, a psychopath paralegal represented by the attorneys she works for, to rob me of my inheritance. This psychopath simply walked-in one day and tricked my elderly frail father as he suffered from the effects of untreated Hepatocellular Carcinoma as his mental state devolved into hallucinations, confusion, delirium and hepatic encephalopathy’s such that he no longer knew who he was, to sign over his estate to her in a Trust she created with the help of one of her attorneys to replace my father’s Trust of 20 years that disinherited this psycho and her family. 2 days after he signed this Trust she drove him to a Hospice where he died hours later. She then hid his death. There was no funeral, service or remembrance of any kind and he lay at the funeral home for 10 days before burial with no one in attendance or knowing he died. It was only by accident weeks later that I found out when Social Security sent me a letter. Because my father years before had taken out a Reverse Mortgage for the sole-purpose of protecting his property from this psycho and her family whom already had taken most of his money, it was to make sure I would inherit it as his significant-other and sole-surviving child, this psycho petitioned an Order Confirming Trust Assets. In disbelief and where a Lab Monkey would have thrown out the Petition and call for a criminal investigation, Sterne allowed-in this Trust rife with the usual extensive Trust legal jargon and a tiny paragraph disinheriting me. Sterne despite such statements in this Petition as 'Settlor was gravely ill when he created his Trust' and obvious perjuries of 'what my father wished and intended and expressed to her [psycho]’, as well as missing and hidden assets, Sterne simply ruled in one sentence in favor of the psycho that I was disinherited. "There are many Paths to the Well" said Sterne at the Cate Convocation in April of 2018, "and my career has been one that makes a difference in daily lives, the trut