Alleviating Court Congestion: The Case of the Jerusalem District Court

Court congestion is a worldwide phenomenon with negative societal effects such as delayed access to justice and drawn-out procedures, as well as negative economic ramifications. In this paper, we report on a field study conducted in cooperation with the Jerusalem District Court in Israel with the aim of reducing average case processing time within the existing set of resources. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the judicial process using operational concepts that have been successfully implemented in other contexts, and we adapted them to the court process. We further collected data before and after the operational changes were implemented to assess the efficacy of the implementation. We exploited the distinctive structure of the judicial process and the fact that our operational changes targeted one part of that process to propose a variation of the difference-in-differences approach to measure the process improvement. The results suggest that the duration of the treated part of the process was reduced by 46.1% postimplementation. We further examined the effect of the treatment on the quality of the process, measured by appeal rate, and found no adverse effect. These analyses demonstrate the potential of using operational management tools and concepts to improve judicial processes and to contribute to the alleviation of court congestion.