At a time when the UK court system is under increasing pressure, the importance of managing caseload capacity and creating efficiencies where possible cannot be overstated.
As part of the Thomson Reuters Legaltech Data Challenge, Weightmans’ innovation and data teams developed a prototype capacity management tool using historical data from approximately 25,000 High Court cases across a ten-year period.
With a free rein to look at the data, the teams undertook exploratory data analysis and discussed potential use applications before settling on capacity management by modelling the time to judgment depending upon certain case features. In order to create the tool, the data was flattened and then various data science techniques were applied.
A number of technical challenges arose, including inconsistencies in the date format which needed to be rectified before modelling. In addition, one year’s worth of data was used initially; whilst this gave a working model, the accuracy was increased by exploring an additional ten years’ worth of data.
This is merely the starting point for the prototype tool; future applications could be used to examine capacity court by court, or to set service levels to assist court users with establishing realistic timescales for judgments or redeploy judicial resource to help manage workloads.
If you want to reach out to the Weightmans team or discuss the future possibilities of legal data analytics, get in touch with desmond.brady@tr.com.
