All civil appeal notices filed from February 1978 through March 1979 were reviewed by the court's senior staff attorney and sorted into two mutually exclusive categories. The first category contained all appeals in which a prehearing conference was likely to be beneficial. Appeals which satisfied one or more of the eligibility criteria totaled 230, and this sample constituted the mandatory-conference segment of the study. Appeals not satisfying any of the screening criteria did not require a prehearing conference, but the opportunity for an elective conference was offered, yielding 420 appeals designated for the elective-conference segment of the study. In both the mandatory-conference and the elective-conference segments of the evaluation, a control group was designated to provide a basis of comparison on the performance measure (reduced workload of judges). The findings indicate that the prehearing conference had a significant effect in reducing the number of motions judges had to hear, and there was a significant reduction in elapsed time from the filing of the appellant's brief to argument. There were no significant differences between the groups in the rates of settlement of appeals. There were no situations in which having the circuit judge either scheduled or actually present at the conference changed significantly any of the results found for the conference group in which only the staff attorney participated. Materials used in the study are appended.