The Purpose of the Guide

 

This Guide is the result of an ongoing collaboration between the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA), the Court Statistics Project (CSP) of the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), trial court administrators, state and trial court statisticians, and other court experts from around the country.  Since the first edition of the State Court Model Statistical Dictionary, published in 1980, and the subsequent revisions of 1984 and 1989, these groups and individuals have worked together to assist all state courts in organizing information on their caseloads.  The nature of the assistance is a suggested way of counting, defining, and classifying cases at the initial stage when they are filed, and at the final stage when they are resolved.  Guidelines are offered for both trial and appellate courts and for the full variety of matters that they handle.

 

The authors understand and acknowledge that state courts vary, sometimes dramatically, in their caseloads, procedures, and techniques for resolving cases.  For this reason, significant emphasis was placed on gathering as much information as practical, from as many states and courts as possible, to ensure that the Guide is applicable to a broad range of courts.  It is meant to be a flexible tool that courts can adapt to fit their legal and subject matter jurisdictions.  It is not a uniform standard that all courts should strive to use in exactly the same way.

 

The improvements to this Guide are also designed to achieve another goal.  Whereas earlier versions strove to provide a tool with which all courts could report caseloads in a comparable and meaningful way, this document also sets out to capture and provide much of the information necessary to present a clearer picture of court workload.  A court that is capable of gathering most or all of the data sought here would be well on the way to generating the types of reports critical in conducting studies of the need for judges and judicial officer support staff.