Konferencja „Kierunki reform sądownictwa w społecznych projektach ustaw Stowarzyszenia Sędziów Polskich IUSTITIA”, Senat RP, 25.4.2024 r.

Marius Bartninkas, President of the Kaunas Regional Court, Member of the Judicial Council in Lithuania

Case weighting system. A new tool for an effective court management

I’d like to start with concepts: Do we have the same understanding of what the case weighting system means.

CEPEJ back in 2020 provided that case-weights assign different weights for different types of cases to account for variations in complexity and the need for judicial attention per each case type. By doing so, case-weights indicate how much more or less time-consuming one type of case is compared to other types of cases. But what’s the purpose of such comparison? Where the case weighting system is to be used? This is exactly the problem we faced in Lithuania, when back in 2021 the newly elected Judicial Council named among its main goals the determination of the optimal workload of a judge. Starting to implement it we realized that we had very different understandings of what this concept meant.

The case weighing system itself is only a tool whose content and functionalities depend on the purpose we use it for.

I would divide the purposes for which we use the case weighting system in Lithuania into three main categories: a) the distribution of cases; b) the optimization of resources; c) and the evaluation of performance.

An advanced electronic court information system LITEKO has been implemented in Lithuania since 2004. After a series of improvements, which are also currently underway, LITEKO is used not only to register cases, but also to allocate each case to specific judge by electronic means, using algorithms. There is no doubt that the number of cases assigned to a judge does not tell everything about his or her workload, since the complexity of different categories of cases varies significantly. There is why we need a weighting system.

Moreover, in the last few years amendments to procedural laws were introduced, granting to the president of the higher court, who carries out the external administration of the activities of the lower courts, the right after determining significant differences in workload, to transfer both civil and criminal cases from the court to which they are adjudicated to another court with the lowest workload. As practice has shown, the weight of case is important criteria not only when comparing workloads of different courts, but also when deciding on the number of cases to be transferred. Simpler cases, that do not require oral procedure, are the first to be transferred, so the proper assessment of the weights of each category of cases becomes essential.

Now speaking about optimization of resources, when a decrease in the total number of cases was recorded for several years starting probably from 2015-2016 and politicians began to use this as an important factor in negotiations on the financing of the judicial system, saying that less cases means less workload, while the number of judges is not changing, there was a need to analyze in detail the structure of the number of cases, the reasons for the decrease in numbers and the impact on the workload of judges. Should we make changes in the courts network, adjust the total number of judges or, on the contrary, should we gather arguments for a discussion with social partners and politicians that the system is efficient enough and the internal reserves are exhausted.

And last but not least, workload is also one of the four evaluation criteria of a judge’s performance, together with the quality of decisions, duration of proceedings and organizational skills. We can see that absolute numbers of cases differ significantly, but sometimes it is determined by objective reasons, for example, the specialization of judges, and some categories of cases, depending on procedural requirements, are much more time consuming than the others.

So the question is not whether the case weighting system is necessary, the question is how to make it as effective and suitable for our needs as possible?

The starting point was LITEKO system, which is very statistics friendly, because all the proceedings related data is recorded, including documents, evidences submitted by the parties, data about number and length of court hearings as well as court rulings, decisions and judgements. This was one of the reasons why this Delphi (Calculated estimate) method of data calculation has been chosen as an alternative to the so called Time study or empirical data method that is used, e.g. in Austria or Germany, where judges are asked to fill in a form with the data regarding the actual time spent handling different categories of cases and the weights of different categories of cases are set taking into account the results of the analysis of such empirical data. In Lithuania by means of expert evaluation we compiled a list of different groups of cases as well as a list of different relevant elements of each of those case groups and used statistical data from LITEKO to set the weight of each case group. In this way, assigning a relative weight to a certain case category made it possible to determine weight proportions between cases of different categories, based on the statistics, which were further evaluated and set by experts and then officially approved by the Judicial Council.

The LITEKO system was programmed in the way that at the moment the case is filed it has to be assigned to one or other category and carries the weight of this category. During the distribution procedure, the algorithm calculates the workload of judges based on the number of those weighted cases received by each judge in the last 90 days and the new case is assigned to the judge with the lowest workload.