Justice system agencies around the worldcontinue to seek adequate methods to estimate staffingneeds. Especially when caseload rise and budgets arelimited, the pressure is on to justify adequate staffingwith solid data. The simpler approaches of basing staffingneeds on number of cases filed or population numbers haveproven to be imprecise at best and seriously flawed atworst. The search for better estimation measures first ledto weighted caseload studies, which weighed the complexityand other special needs of different case types. As thesemethods still did not provide an accurate assessment,efforts continue to be made to develop a more precisemeasure of not just caseload but workload, a measure thatfactors in the time spent on managing the case and on theincreasing amount of non-case-related work, such asadministration, training, outreach, travel, etc. This paperdescribes the leading approaches (including the analytical,Delphi, and weighted caseload methods) used throughout theworld for determining workload among justice sectoremployees, presenting the benefits and limitations of each.The paper then focuses on what is currently viewed as themore optimum method of the weighted workload study, andoffers a step-by-step outline of how this kind of study canbe developed and implemented. Also considered are the dualchallenges of forecasting future staffing needs andincorporating performance measures to promote qualitydecision making and cost-efficient court procedures and services.
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