Duration of Court Events Required for Litigation – An Empirical Study to Provide a Theoretical Basis for an Objective Measurement System for Judicial Workload

The balanced operation of the judiciary is a fundamental social interest, regardless of the legal system and of the form of government. This is largely determined by the workload of judges, which is simply measured by the number of cases in the majority of judicial administration systems, but it also depends largely on their complexity. The latter can best be captured through the amount of total judicial working time incurred, until the cases are settled. However, we do not know how to measure it. Is there a justifiable difference between individual cases in this respect? The territorial distribution of cases with different working time demands is also unknown. To answer these questions, I conducted a retrospective empirical study on the records of completed criminal lawsuits at first instance regional courts. The obtained data were analysed by statistical methods. The research proved that the working time demand can be reliably estimated subsequently, and it shows an extremely large deviation. Additionally, the territorial distribution of cases with different working time demand is uneven. This necessitates the development of a judicial workload measurement system, based on the next phase of the research, which would also consider differences in working time demands through a weight that can be assigned to the case.