NCJ Number
121590
Journal
Research Bulletin Issue: 26 Dated: (1989) Pages: 45-48
Date Published
1989
Length
4 pages
Annotation
This article describes a modification of the measure of court workloads for the Management Information System for British magistrates' courts.
Abstract
The management information system described by Massey and Morgan (1988) was developed to assist courts in the assessment of efficiency in using existing resources by enabling courts to compare their use of resources between one another. Such comparisons require measures of workload that can be related to the overall costs or to the staff and building resources used. A workload measure must combine the number of each case type with some indicator of the relative amount of work that each type requires. The latter is called a "weight," and the overall sum of each caseload multiplied by its appropriate "weight" is called the "weighted caseload." To supply the necessary weights, measures are needed for the average amount of in-court time and out-of-court time required by each case type. One possible approach would be the work study method, which would involve conducting exercises in a number of courts to estimate the time spent on each case type. Another method is the general statistical approach, which uses information on the caseloads of a large number of clerkships, the sitting hours required, and the staff used to deduce the average amounts of work in each case type to best explain the resources used in individual courts. This change in workload measures from that used in analyzing the 1986 data does cause some changes in the ranking of clerkships, but these are small. 1 table, 3 references.