Measure What Matters: The Role of Data in Confident Justice

Courts across the country are asked to do more with less. Leaders face mounting case volumes, evolving public expectations, and rapidly changing technology — all while budgets tighten. Yet the mission remains the same: deliver confident justice.

Before any new system or workflow can deliver on that promise, courts must first understand their current reality. From The Framework for a Confident Court, this initial step is known as measurement: a practice to define and discover the inefficiencies that shape court operations. It encompasses a shared understanding of what’s working, where bottlenecks exist, and most importantly, why.

By measuring what matters, the measure step separates reactive justice agencies from those who act with clarity. Courts move past assumptions to instead embrace evidence-based action. They leverage data insights to see which processes create unnecessary delays, where resources are strained, and how performance varies across jurisdictions, departments, or case types.

Why Courts Should Measure What Matters

Technology has made it easier than ever to collect data, but without a clear purpose, data alone can warp court leaders’ view of their current landscape as perception could be mistaken for fact.

Alternatively, high-performing courts gather necessary information to measure the results of current practices before deciding how to solve preconceived problems. This step answers critical questions such as:

• Where are cases getting stuck? And why?
• Which court tasks consume the most staff time?
• How do these challenges affect timeliness or public perception of justice?

By aligning court measurements with impacts, courts create a common operating language. This alignment matters in driving effective and widely adopted change.

Turning Data Into Direction

While there are hundreds of metrics to define court operations, from case filings to jury management, several key performance indicators (KPIs) can quickly reveal where friction exists and why. Let’s explore the case filing and review process as an example workflow that protrudes with bottlenecks.

A court case backlog is more than a stack of delayed cases — it’s a signal. A significant culprit of a growing backlog is the workforce gap. The birth rate peaked in 2007, and those individuals are just now entering the workforce. Unfortunately, this data implies that every year moving forward, the pool of available and qualified applicants will decline, exacerbating the challenge of attracting and retaining staff.

What this ultimately means for courts is that as incoming filings outpace the availability of adequate tools and resources, timely acceptance, review, and hearing of cases are often consequentially sacrificed.

Adding to this external pressure are the internal constraints that exist within workflows.

Although many filings are submitted electronically, the review process remains largely manual, consuming an average of 7.5 minutes to review, validate, and docket each filing. With thousands of submissions each week, these delays in case progression accumulate. And though it is never intentional, these delays do undermine legal outcomes and public confidence.

By measuring incoming filings against document processing variables and outputs, courts have a better visualization of current KPIs and bottlenecks.

This foundation of data is what provides direction to confident justice.

Connecting Data Across the Court System

It’s important to note that no single KPI tells the whole story.

Viewing court metrics in isolation risks misdirecting efforts, while viewing them holistically paints a complete picture of court performance. A backlog may appear to be the core issue, but deeper analysis might reveal that it stems from slow document acceptance or unpredictable filing spikes.

That’s why measurement must be multi-dimensional. It’s not enough to know what is happening in siloes. Courts must bring workflows together, such as e-filing measures with review procedures, understand why bottlenecks occur, and how one influences another. This layered approach helps courts visualize bottlenecks across people, processes, and technology and where to focus efforts for the greatest return.

When measured effectively, KPIs serve as the pathway to confident decision-making.

Looking Ahead: From Measurement to Automation

Identifying bottlenecks is only the beginning. Once courts identify where challenges exist, the next step is to address them with precision and real-world applications.

In the next article, we’ll explore how courts can move from measurement to automation — acting with insight and applying solutions to solve the right problems for confident justice.

Automation with Purpose: The Mindset for Confident Justice

Step two of the framework explores enhancing court workflows by solving tangible problems with practical solutions.