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Reporting for different classes of cases

It is also envisaged that a separate report would be produced by each Court for each major class of business for which the Court has established separate performance goals. Court managers will, presumably, wish to monitor performance at much finer levels of operational detail — for example by division or 'list', and by registry — but there is no need to report this detail beyond the precincts of the Court itself. (Indeed, detail of this kind will be meaningless and obfuscating to readers not involved in the Court's day-to-day management.)

It appeared from the consultations that some Courts were quite concerned about significant differences between types of cases in their caseloads, and these Courts may contemplate addressing the differences by establishing different performance standards in relation to them. Ultimately this is a matter for each Court to resolve for itself. However, setting different performance goals for different categories of business does present some difficulty, and it therefore seems advisable to add a few cautionary words specifically on this issue.

It has been a long-standing convention in New South Wales Courts, as in Australian Courts generally, that it is appropriate to apply different performance standards to criminal and civil caseloads. It is then appropriate that Courts having both jurisdictions should produce separate performance reports for each. Otherwise, however, there are important reasons why Courts should be extremely reluctant to differentiate among categories of work and 'segment' their public performance reporting in this way.

The Model KPIs were designed to provide Courts with the means to produce a simple, clear and comprehensive picture of how they are performing. This aim will be diminished by reporting for multiple categories of cases. But more importantly, having different performance standards for different classes of business raises an equity issue. Different performance standards are apt to affect resource priorities, and in this sense they can be discriminatory — greater resources are likely to be given to the class of cases with the most demanding standards than to others. This kind of discrimination may well be justified⁶ — the important point of principle is that it must be, whenever the Court contemplates applying different standards of performance to different classes of cases.