The Judicial Council uses weighted caseload assessments to measure the number of judges and other resources needed in each court. This is a widely recognized and accepted approach for evaluating workload. The resulting calculation is an estimate of the resources needed for each court’s case processing work.
Weighted caseload relies on three basic components:
annual number of court filings by case type;
caseweights and other model parameters that estimate how much time court case processing activities take by case type;
a staff-year value, which quantifies the amount of time case processing staff or judicial officers have for their work activities.
Judicial Workload Study
The Judicial Workload Study is a weighted caseload methodology to measure trial court judicial officer need. The resulting calculation estimates the number of judicial officers required for each court’s case processing work. The results of this study form the foundation for the Judicial Needs Assessment, which the Judicial Council conducts and reports biennially to the Legislature.
Judicial Needs Assessment
Government Code section 69614(c) requires that the Judicial Council report biennially to the Legislature on the need for new judgeships in the Superior Courts using the uniform criteria for allocation of judgeships described in Government Code section 69614(b).
The public’s right to timely access to justice is contingent on having adequate judicial resources in every jurisdiction. In recent years, the branch has received funding for the 50 judgeships authorized by AB 159. This funding has greatly minimized the gap between the number of authorized judgeships and judicial need. However, there continues to be workload-based judicial need in some superior courts.
The Resource Assessment Study (RAS) is a weighted caseload methodology to measure trial court case processing staff need. The resulting calculation is an estimate of the staff needed for each court’s case processing work, expressed as full-time equivalents (FTE).
The FTE need produced by RAS is translated into dollars using average salary costs, adjusting for local cost-of-labor using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and including actual retirement and health care costs. Non-personnel costs and other elements are factored into the Workload Formula to project the total funding need for each court.
