Preparation of annual and other periodical court reports (quarterly etc.) has always been a difficult manual and time-consuming process for the key stakeholders – the Supreme Court of Cassation, the Ministry of Justice and the High Court Council, but also for the individual courts. The entire process has for the most part been manual driven. The key stakeholders would ask for the reports from the individual courts, which would submit them usually in form of excel spreadsheets, which were then aggregated, reviewed, possibly corrected by the key stakeholders in coordination with the courts, and afterwards compiled into summary reports (i.e. report for all basic courts). As said, this process has been time consuming, but maybe even more important suitable for manual made mistakes.
For those reasons, 4 Digits Consulting has, as part of the “Institutional Strengthening of the High Court Council” project funded by USAID, aimed at developing changes to the court used case management systems, in order to implement a statistical tool suitable for on-line collection of court reports. In coordination with the stakeholder representatives, the Project has carefully analyzed the current and future needs of the beneficiary in order to provide the best long-term sufficient and sustainable solution – something that would satisfy the current needs of the stakeholders, but would also be suitable for later improvement and additional development.
The result of this was the development and implementation of a centralized statistical tool based on Business Intelligence software, providing not only a tool for easier collection of court reports, but also a strong analytical tool.
Aside from massively helping the user in court report collection and aggregation, the centralized statistical tool is also an immeasurable analytical tool. All the generated statistical data is, aside from standard reporting form, also shown in graphical form, with intuitive pie charts and graphs. Such ability of the implemented technical solution to easily handle and crunch large amounts of caseload data and provide historical, current and even predictive views of court performance, enables MOJ, HJC, SCC to make informed, facts-based managerial decisions and preemptively address potential problems and performance bottlenecks.
As part of the implementation process, an in-depth presentation was held on July 13th to key representatives of the beneficiaries – the Supreme Court of Cassation, the Ministry of Justice and the High Court Council, in the SCC premises, during which a detailed explanation was provided on how to generate reports from the centralized statistical tool, how to use the already implemented graphical representation of the report data, but also what are the additional functionalities of the centralized statistical tool which enable ad hoc reporting and analytics.
The introduction of centralized court statistics implemented through the “Institutional Strengthening of the HCC” project is the pilot step in the implementation of centralized court statistics in Serbian judiciary. Even more than that, it is a revolutionary step, serving as a proof of concept and breaking the stigma of whether something like that can be done in Serbia’s justice sector. Also, it will serve as a valuable “lessons learned” for future upgrade and improvement of the centralized statistical tool.