NCJ Number
130442
Date Published
1991
Length
110 pages
Annotation
This General Accounting Office review of the U.S. Department of Justice's process for allocating attorneys among the 94 U.S. Attorney offices aimed to determine whether attorney staffing disparities exist among the offices, and if so, to identify attorney staffing allocation methods that would substantially reduce disparities among offices and make the staff allocations more economically efficient.
Abstract
The General Accounting Office developed a model (the "workload model") designed to account for differences in the workloads of the U.S. Attorney offices. This model was used to assess attorney staffing disparities among U.S. Attorney offices. A second model (the "allocation model") was used to allocate new attorney positions in such a way as to reduce staffing disparities identified by the workload model. Before developing the models, the researchers met with officials at the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys and 28 U.S. Attorney offices and reviewed the literature on case weighting models. Officials provided most of the data for the review. The study concludes that the Justice Department's allocation process does not adequately account for differences in complexity of legal workload among U.S. Attorney offices. The application of the workload model found that resource disparities do exist among the U.S. Attorney offices. The allocation model distributed additional positions to the attorney offices in such a way as to reduce staffing disparities identified by the workload model. 30 tables and 4 figures