Judge Michael Brown is wrestling with deadlines from a federal law pushing judges to decide motions in civil cases within six months, and it’s a problem he partly inherited.

Saddled with dozens of filings from before he joined the bench in January 2018, the U.S. District judge in the Northern District of Georgia had 177 undecided motions that had been pending more than six months, leading the federal judiciary’s latest semiannual listing required by the Civil Justice Reform Act of 1990.