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Model key performance indicators for NSW Courts  

, 2000 This report represents the results of a project to develop model key performance indicators for New South Wales Courts. The project was a joint undertaking between the New South Wales Attorney General`s Department and the Justice Research Centre. Its aim was to improve the management information used to help the courts do their work effectively.

Ch 3. Backlog


The backlog indicator is a direct measure of the Court’s performance against its case processing time standards. However it translates this performance into simple data concerning the Court’s pending caseload. This is extremely significant from a management point of view. There is an argument for saying that, if a Court has adopted a time standard, like ‘all cases should be finalised with 18 months of commencement’, then the key performance indicator should be constructed in exactly the same terms as the goal — that is, the report should indicate the percentage of cases finalised in the relevant period within the time standard. The problem with this view is that the key performance indicator is then historical, and tells the Court that it met its time standard. The Backlog figure tells the Court if it is meeting its time standard. Moreover, the message is in simple terms: ‘The Court has n cases on hand which are “past their use-by date”.’ (‘n’ is a standard symbol used in mathematics to signify a variable which is a whole number.) Particular attention can be given to those cases.

Both of the model reports illustrated in Figure 1 and Figure 2 use case processing time standards which are two-tiered or ‘split’ as, in the example of the Intermediate Court (Figure 2), ‘90% of all cases should be finalised within 12 months of commencement, and all cases should be finalised within 2 years.’ As already noted, this is not an essential feature of the model (and individual Courts might choose to adopt standards in a different form), but two-tiered standards like this are common and are an extremely sensible way of acknowledging the existence of ‘ordinary’ and ‘exceptional’ by defining a norm for ‘most’ and establishing a ‘boundary’ around the exceptions. Where a split standard is adopted, then two backlog figures are reported.

In accordance with accepted definition, the Backlog is the number of ‘old’ cases on hand in excess of the number allowed under the time standards. As a consequence, the formula for calculating this number contains a factor which adjusts the number older than the norm by the proportion allowed under the standard. The general formulae for calculating the Backlog figures then are —


The calculation using the more ‘concrete’ example of the Intermediate Court (Figure 2) is as follows — In light of the consultations on the Discussion Paper, it is recommended that the Backlog indicator should also report the proportion of the pending caseload older than the relevant time periods adopted under the standards. Including proportions as well as simple numbers makes the statistics more meaningful and informative. It also makes the time standards adopted by the Court more transparent. It should be noted that the proportion of the caseload older than the normative time standard is not the same as the Backlog(>norm) — only the proportion (if any) greater than the proportion allowed by the standard7 is properly characterised as backlog. This point is, however, made evident by the format of the Report.


7  the figure represented by x in the generic example illustrated in Figure 1, or set at 10% in the Intermediate Court example given in Figure 2.