Note: Previous Staffing Level Tables are in PDF Format Only.

Description of Superior Court Judicial Needs Estimation

In March 2001, a new methodology for estimating judicial needs in the superior courts was adopted by the Administrative Office of the Courts in conjunction with the Superior Court Judges' Association. Beginning with the 2001 Annual Report, a yearly table is published displaying court-level judicial needs estimates using this methodology, along with a brief description of the process.

The superior court model for estimating judicial needs is workload-based. The estimates are derived from a statistical model with two primary data components: (1) the observed caseload processed, and (2) the number of available judicial officers. The caseload measure is represented by case resolutions, and the judicial officer measure is represented by judge and commissioner FTEs. Any significant effects due to differences in court size are captured during the estimation process. In order to ensure that a good representative sample underlies the estimation, the data are drawn from courts across the state and from the past several years.

This type of approach has wide usage in a number of diverse applications and so provides a well-established base model. One of the inherent advantages of this methodology is the facility to capture changes in practice over time. Another advantage is that qualitative adjustments - based upon objective data - are possible. A qualitative adjustment adopted for use in the superior court model relies upon the published case-management statistics for various case types to create a "time standards adjustment factor." This adjustment allocates additional resources based upon an individual court's time-in-process results versus the case-processing time standards adopted by the Board for Judicial Administration.* In other words, the model recognizes when a court has a case backlog problem, and takes into consideration the judicial resources needed by that court to reduce the delay in case processing. This adjustment factor is a way to introduce an objective quality assurance check on the baseline prediction from the input-output model.

Please note, there are differences across courts (e.g., case mix, prosecution practices, therapeutic courts, jury trials, state agency filings, etc.) that will impact judicial need. Additionally, there are limitations within the Objective Workload method in that it does not reflect best practices unless they are already in place and it does not take account of other local differences in court operations. Local operations and other circumstances that create differences between predicted judicial need from the Objective Workload model and actual need can be well-described only by the particular affected court. Statements of local conditions may be necessary for courts in their requests for additional judges to their local and state funding bodies. The JNE results are one indicator of judicial need, but they are not the only valid evidence of judicial needs. For additional information, please contact Dr. Carl McCurley at the Washington State Center for Court Research, Administrative Office of the Courts, at carl.mccurley@courts.wa.gov or 360-705-5312.

* The case-processing time standards were adopted by the Board for Judicial Administration as an objective means for courts to measure the pace of cases from filing to resolution. They are published in the Washington Court Rules.