Assessing the Performance of a Court System: A Comprehensive Performance Measures Approach

Many court systems suffer from long lead times, poor service quality, and low throughput. In many cases improvements are continuously introduced through various managerial and professional methods. This article proposes a set of measures to assess the effectiveness of court systems. This set of performance measures includes response-time, throughput, and work-in-process. While court systems generate a multitude of statistical data it is difficult to apply them across individual courts.The article tailors well established generic performance measures to the specific court arena. The individual measures are aggregated into a single figure that assesses the court's performance along the time axis and relative to comparable court systems.The proposed measure of performance and the aggregate score were validated with real life figures from the Israeli court system.