AO Staff Measure the Needs of the Courts

How many people does it take to run the federal Judiciary? What’s the formula for a properly staffed court? The Judiciary has told Congress that courts are staffed well below the recommended staffing levels. What does that mean? In the Administrative Office, staffing requirements and analysis are handled by a team of specialists led by Beverly Bone. This group’s specialty is work measurement, and its job is to answer these and related questions. The group’s members develop the formulas that determine the number of people a court unit needs to process the workload.

Work measurement, like time studies or stop watch studies, has been used since the industrial revolution when managers wanted to know how long a task should take, and how many workers it took to do it. The Judiciary adopted the methodology slightly more than 20 years ago. “We prefer a statistical method of work measurement known as operational audit,” Bone explains, “because it has proved to be the most accurate for the Judiciary.”

Bone and her AO team, with members of court working groups, first develop a work center description, which is a detailed list of all the tasks performed in an office. “Then using the description, we interview the people actually doing the work,” said Bone. “We ask how long it takes them to complete a task, and how often they perform the task. People’s estimates of their own work is surprisingly accurate.”

The list and the interview information are consolidated. Databases are constructed, potential workload factors are analyzed, and historical workload is considered. From all this data, a staffing formula emerges for each court unit. The formulas are often complex with many different elements. Elements for districts can be the relationship between courthours and civil filings; the number of criminal defendants; and the number of judges available to a court. The increased staffing needs of courts with divisions have to be taken into consideration.

Last summer the Judicial Conference Committee on Judicial Resources approved a recommendation to review and revise all staffing formulas for court support offices. AO work measurement teams have headed out to circuit, district, bankruptcy, and probation and pretrial services offices across the country to begin the new project. Some of the formulas are at least six years old and fail to reflect either new legislation or the introduction of new technology to the courts.

n the districts, study teams composed of a court unit representative and a member of the AO’s work measurement staff will visit 25 of the 94 courts. Courts are randomly sampled to get different geographical areas, courts with and without divisions, courts with different technology, and courts with diverse case mixes. All courts of appeals and circuit level offices will be visited.

Court representatives are drawn from the appellate, district, bankruptcy, and probation and pretrial services work groups that developed and revised the work center descriptions. “When we visit the sites, members of the work group come along to conduct the interviews,” said Bone. “They not only created the work description, they typically also have done the work in their own courts, so they know what questions to ask.”

As of mid-July, five of the 12 circuits had been visited, as had 13 of 25 randomly selected district courts, 19 of the probation and pretrial services offices, and 17 of the bankruptcy courts. By mid-November, Bone hopes to have completed the data collection and to begin the analysis stage. Advice and comments will be sought from court advisory groups.

New staffing formulas will be presented to the Judicial Conference Committee on Judicial Resources and other committees at their June 2000 meeting and then to the Conference in September. The approved formulas will be used for staffing allocation in fiscal year 2001. “The work measurement formulas provide statistically reliable tools and a sound methodology for quantitatively expressing the staffing needs of the courts,” said Chief Judge Julia Smith Gibbons (W. D. Tenn.), chair of the Judicial Resources Committee. “Use of the formulas reflects the Judiciary’s commitment to requesting only those resources required to fulfill our core mission of handling cases in a just, timely, and efficient manner. We want to know as precisely as possible what staff is necessary for the delivery of appropriate service to litigants, witnesses, jurors, attorneys, and the public so that we can staff at an adequate, but not excessive, level.”

“Currently, the courts are functioning at what we know to be well below their recommended staffing,” said Bone, “which often means putting some projects or work on the back burner. Automating some processes helps, but it is not the total solution. We need better staffing measurements to give Congress. We need to measure and present the data for the best possible formulas.”