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Chapter 5. Clearance ratio

The Clearance Ratio is very similar to the Overload indicator but, instead of comparing the Court’s pending caseload to its capacity, it relates the incoming volume with the Court’s capacity to finalise, or ‘clear’ its cases. It is a slightly more useful monitor for the Court which is staying out of trouble, while overload is primarily a measure of how much trouble a Court may be in.

Most Courts maintain monthly and annual statistics on new registrations and finalisations. The Clearance Ratio is a simple way of analysing the trends in this data and synthesising the essential message: ‘The Court is (or is not) keeping up with its workload.'

The Clearance Ratio is the number of finalisations for a chosen reporting period, divided by the number of receipts or registrations in the same period, multiplied by 100 (to convert the number to a percentage). A figure of 100% indicates that the Court is keeping up with its workload; more means that it is reducing its pending caseload while a figure of less than 100% means the Court is accumulating cases.

The running period over which the new registrations and finalisation figures are calculated is to some extent a matter of choice (as in the case of the Overload calculation), although if it is too short the figures will be influenced by episodic fluctuations which in fact have no significance. The utility of the Clearance Ratio as a ‘staying out of trouble’ monitor can be enhanced (and the information redundancy with the Overload indicator reduced) by choosing a reporting period which is shorter. This has the effect of increasing the measure’s sensitivity to changes which may portend trouble, although as with the calculation of Overload, the trick is to avoid making the measure sensitive to meaningless short-term fluctuations in the Court’s caseload or finalisation rate. As a point of departure, either a quarter or half year are suggested, although this will depend again on the time standards adopted by the Court and the month-to-month variations in its volumes

The Clearance Ratio by itself is not completely unambiguous: If it is less than 100% it means that the Court is getting through less work than is coming in, but this might be because more work is coming in, or the Court is finalising fewer cases, or a combination of both. Detailed trend information on receipts and finalisations will resolve these ambiguities but requires a high level of synthesis from the reader. The model report provides the same data in already synthesised forms: These are the ‘caseload’ factor and the ‘finalisations’ factor which are reported only as ‘up’, ‘down’ or ‘unchanged’.

The caseload factor is calculated by comparing the running total for new cases (of the relevant case type) in the reporting period with the running total for the same period the year before. If the current period is ‘up’ on the same period in the year previous, this means, rather obviously, that the Court’s workload has increased. Similarly, the finalisations factor is calculated by comparing the running total finalisations with the running total for the same period the year before. If the current period is ‘down’ on the previous year, this means that the Court’s productivity has decreased in relative terms. (This, in turn, could be due to a number of factors, such as increasing average trial lengths, fewer settlements or fewer available judges, which can be the subject of more detailed analysis by the Court’s managers.)

In the Discussion Paper it was proposed that the ‘caseload’ and ‘productivity’ (now ‘finalisations’) indices should be indexed to the total number of judges, because this would incorporate an adjustment for resource changes in the report. In the course of the consultations it was pointed out that some Courts make extensive use of part-time appointees and would therefore have practical difficulties in indexing caseloads and finalisations to available judicial resources. One solution was to translate actual usage of part-time appointees into an ‘equivalent full-time’ measure but on reflection it seemed that by far the easiest solution is not to index for available resources at all. This greatly simplifies the calculation, while also ameliorating some sensitivity aroused by the productivity measure. If there is a notable change in the finalisation rate from one year to the next, the role played by available resources is simply one of the possible explanations the Court’s managers will wish to investigate.