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

And soon an obvious problem was encountered: statistical averages are called averages because they do not always reflect the reality. The time required to examine two civil cases arising, for example, from contractual relations, belonging to the same category, can be very different, because, in one case, the judge can simply refuse to accept the claim, because of some procedural deficiencies, the parties can conclude a settlement, and in another case it may be necessary to hold several hearings, have expertise, apply to the constitutional court for the clarification of the legal regulation, and produce a judgement, etc. But in the system used such different cases, belonging to the same category, bear the same weight.

As a result, it was decided to create a system that would allow to individualize the weight of the case in the course of the proceedings. After weight is assigned at the moment the case was filed, changes from the established average were allowed to be made by uploading significant data into the LITEKO system, such as the number of the parties, the number of requests or demands, the number of volumes, the number and duration of court hearings, as well as the number of documents prepared by the court or even the time spent on their preparation.

Such “upgrade” revealed other problematic aspects. On the one hand, 90 days reference period used for the case allocation procedure usually is not enough to resolve complicated cases. This is why it was decided to create a dualistic weighting system, where for the purpose of allocation of cases we sticked to the usage of weights of cases filed during reference period (90 days) and for the purpose of assessing the workload of the courts for efficiency reasons as well as evaluating the judge’s performance we choose to weight the cases resolved during the reference period (usually 1 year). This dualism often brings confusion, because the results of calculations of the workload of the same judge, when based on different criteria, can vary significantly.

On the other hand, certain cultural or mentality aspects were also revealed, which showed that it would be difficult to adapt in Lithuania Time study or empirical data method. The problem is not only the complexity of collecting and interpreting such data, or the fact that implementation of such method itself is time consuming, but also the negative perceptions, clearly offensive attitude of the judges themselves, who view every initiative of an administrative nature as a threat, interference into their independence. Therefore, when they were given the opportunity to make the records in the LITEKO system themselves, they were uploading exaggerated data to show how hard they work, even with some clear cases of abuse, distortion of statistics, uploading clearly inaccurate information hoping to make an impact on the real workload.

For this reason, in 2016 the possibility to individualize the weight of a specific case was abandoned, leaving those average weights approved by the Judicial Council.

Another feature of the case weighting system used – it is point or benchmark based, which determines its limitations. First of all, maximum efficiency can only be ensured if exact proportions of weights are determined between all categories of cases in courts of all levels and instances. In our system the idea was that for cases allocation and workload balancing purposes we don’t need comparison between courts of different levels or even between two major specializations of civil and criminal cases. For this reason today, having data that the workload of the judges of the criminal cases division of the Kaunas regional court is higher than the average workloads of the judges hearing criminal cases in all regional courts, and at the same time the workload of judges of the civil cases division of the Kaunas regional court is lower than the average workloads of their civil cases hearing colleagues, is not enough for me to conclude that the judges of the criminal division of our court work more than the judges of the civil division and to make relevant organizational adjustments without further analysis. In my personal opinion it is a clear deficiency of our case weighting system, those weight proportions have to be universal throughout the court system as a whole.

At the same time this benchmarks or relative values based system does not answer the question of whether the judge’s overall workload is high or low, they are not aimed at calculating the aggregated judicial working-time required to process the number of incoming cases of different case-types, as is with time-units (minutes or hours) based weights.

Therefore, when the goal of calculating the optimal workload of a judge was set in 2021, the need to relate the weight of cases to the time required to hear a case of different categories became apparent, so that, after evaluating the average length of a judge’s working time, a conclusion could be drawn as to what number of cases would be optimal. For now, this change is in the implementation stage, it applies only to district courts and is being tested in practice in several pilot courts. The idea is that having all categories of cases weighted using time-units based weights, that are periodically review using statistical data would significantly expand the range of system usability.

Having data on the weight of each case, as well as on the total weight of all cases received and resolved in the court during a certain period of reference or the total weight of cases resolved by individual judge, we can ensure effectiveness of case allocation procedure, in the process of optimization objectively estimate the number of judges and court stuff members required as well as evaluate the work results of a specific judge. These are the goals for the nearest future.