• SJFR Home
• Introduction
  • Objective, Scope & Structure
  • Overall Conclusions and Priorities
• Summary with Recommendations
  • 1. External Performance
  • 1a. Efficiency in Justice
    Service Delivery
  • 1b. Quality of Services Delivered
  • 1c. Access to Justice Services
  • 2 Internal Performance
  • 2a. Governance and Management
  • 2b. Financial Management
  • 2c. Human Resource Management
  • 2d. ICT Management
  • 2e. Infrastructure Management
• External Performance Assessment
  • Demand for Justice Services
    • - Chapter Summary
    • a. Introduction
    • b. Overall Demand and Litigation Rate
    • c. Demand for Justice Services
      by Court Type
    • d. Demographic Differences
      in Demand
    • e. Caseloads per Judge
    • f. Workloads of Prosecutors
  • Efficiency in the Delivery of
    Justice Services
    • - Chapter Summary
    • a. Production and Productivity
      of Courts
    • b. Timeliness in Cases Processing
    • c. Effective Enforecement
    • d. Procedural Efficiency and
      Efficiacy
    • e. Gender Impact of Inefficiencies
      in the Court System
    • f. Efficency in Delivery of
      Administrative Services
  • Quality of Justice Services Delivered
    • Chapter Summary
    • a. Introduction
    • b. Quality off Laws and Law-Making
    • c. Quality of Administrative
      Services within the Courts
    • d. Quality in Case Processing
    • e. Quality in Decision-Making
      in Cases
    • f. Effectiveness of the Appeal
      System in Ensuring
      Quality of Decision-Making
    • g. Integrity in Justice Service Delivery
  • Access to Justice Services
    • - Chapter Summary
    • a. Introduction
    • b. Affordability of Justice Services
      (Financial Access to Justice)
    • c. Access to Information
    • d. Access to Alternative
      Dispute Resolution
    • e. Access to Allied
      Professional Services
    • f. Geographic and Physical
      Access to Justice Service
    • g. Equality of Access for Vulnerable Groups
• Internal Performance Assessment
  • Governance and Management
    • - Chapter Summary
    • a. Governance and Management of
      Justice Institutions
    • b. Structures and Powers of
      Governance and Management Bodies
    • c. Effectiveness in Operational
      Management
    • d. Effectiveness in Resource
      Management
    • e. Effectiveness in Strategic
      Management
    • f. Effectiveness of Mechanisms to
      Govern Integrity and Conflicts of
      Interest
    • g. Effectiveness of Complaints and Discipline Processes
  • Financial Management
    • - Chapter Summary
    • - Overview of Expenditure
      Management in the Judiciary
    • a. Effectiveness in Budget Formulation
    • b. Budget Levels and Sources
    • c. Budget Structure
    • d. Effectiveness in Budget Execution
    • e. Arrears
    • f. Financial Management Staffing
    • g. Financial Controls
    • h. Financial Reporting
  • Human Resource Management
    • - Chapter Summary
    • a. Introduction
    • b. Staffing Levels and Methodology
    • c. Recruitment, Evaluation and
      Promotion of Judges and Prosecutors
    • d. Training
    • e. Salary and Benefit Structure for
      Judges, Prosecutors, and Staff
    • f. Support Staff Planning and
      Utilization
    • g. Planning for the Future
    • h. Gender Equity in Employment in
      the Serbian Judiciary
  • ICT Management
    • - Chapter Summary
    • a. Governance of ICT Planning and Investments
    • b. Effectiveness of Case Management
      Information Systems
    • c. Effectiveness of Systems for Management Purposes
    • d. Effectiveness of Electronic
      Exchange of Information
    • e. Availability of Databases and
      Websites Support Judicial Functions
    • f. Quality of e-Justice to Support
      Access to Court Users
    • g. ICT Staffing and Training
  • Infrastructure Management
    • - Chapter Summary
    • a. Analysis of Existing
      Infrastructure Stock
    • b. Management of Judicial
      Infrastructure
• Annexes
  • Annex 1 - Methodology
  • Annex 2 - External Performance Matrix
  • Annex 3 - Internal Performance Matrix
  • Annex 4 - Access to Information
    on Websites
  • Annex 5 - Access to Allied
    Professional Services
  • Annex 6 - Complaints Relating
    to Justice Service Delivery
  • Annex 7 - Law Faculty Curricula
    Relevant to Justice Service Delivery
  • Annex 8 - Variation in the Roles
    of Court Managers across Serbia
  • Annex 9 - Recommendations
  • Annex 10 - References

Internal Performance Assessment > Governance and Management

c. Effectiveness in Operational Management

62. Due to the ongoing organizational changes, the evaluation of internal management is complicated. Both Councils are still implementing their management offices and internal work processes, and it is premature to assess their ability to perform the key functions. This section thus focuses on what the structures still under construction will be able to do, and how they might be expanded for better performance.

i. Internal Organization in Courts

63. The organization of courts has been unstable for some time (see Background Annex). A series of reforms adopted over the last decade reflect different views of how the judicial system, and particularly the courts, should be managed. Some were successful, but many returned to the drawing board. Most recently, the court network was again reorganized in 2014, but this should now stabilize. Although the impetus and methodology were not clear, it was observed that no fiscal impact analysis was conducted. However, any concerns regarding geographic access to justice under the old network should now be fully allayed. As previous court units became Basic Courts, they can now operate at expanded hours and judges need not travel so far.
64. The 2014 change to the court network did not fundamentally change the organization of the system. The same building blocks remain (e.g., the budget, number of buildings, judges, prosecutors, staff, caseloads, and users), but people are now dispersed across a larger number of locations. It is hoped that the network is now settled and will remain so for at least the medium term. Stakeholders report a craving for stability within the organization of courts to allow various reforms to be implemented.
65. However, within-court changes have been fewer and internal re-organization will be inevitable in the transformation. When procedures change, the judicial work, judge-to-staff ratio, and the types of staff will need to change as well. The nature of demand may also change, for example through the use of plea-bargaining or when new departments may be needed to support mediation. The reduction of backlog may also require the temporary creation of enforcement departments to speed up the process.
66. The Councils or the SCC/RPPO should review internal organization and modernize to meet current needs. The need is recognized in the Action Plans which assign the task to ‘working groups.’ These groups may not be well equipped for this type of analysis. To date, little has been done to assess the internal organization of each court or PPO or to determine how productivity or other aspects of performance are affected by the significant organizational variations. The Councils or the SCC/RPPO should consider creating an office or positions within an existing unit to identify optimal internal organization, and support wider adoption. The staff charged with this task could be lawyers, but they will need additional qualifications and skills. A degree or experience in organizational development, industrial engineering, or business administration might be useful. In the meantime, both Councils might recruit external experts to lead the initial analysis.
67. Guidelines should be developed to ensure that resource use is linked to productivity and results, allowing variations from strict finance and staffing models when it can be shown that they are more efficient or effective. The HJC in particular, as the judiciary encompasses more variations, will need to collect and analyze information on the real situation of courts’ organization, staffing patterns, and staff use. It should identify productive experiments such as courts that have formed management teams, preparatory departments and backlog reduction taskforces. Past and current Court Presidents are a resource the HJC should tap for innovative ideas to improve the delivery of court services. Colloquia among Court Presidents would be valuable to further explore what does or does not work, and what is needed at the court level to enable performance improvements.
68. For example, one organizational innovation with reportedly positive results is the introduction of preparatory departments to smooth case processing in civil cases. In the Basic Courts in Uzice and Subotica, preparatory departments have been an efficient way to ensure that cases are ready for hearing, while also reducing the administrative burden on judges. Such departments are composed entirely of judicial assistants devoted to verifying that procedural requirements have been met, researching cases and finding examples of court practice for judges, drafting court decisions, and calculating court fees. Similar arrangements have been used successfully in other countries. France created a special judge (juge de mise en état) to prepare civil cases for adjudication, and common law countries often assign preparatory work to qualified court staff.
69. Lessons learned from these nascent Preparatory Departments should be shared across the system. Results can then be monitored and innovators rewarded. Courts which have been slower to introduce Preparatory Departments could be encouraged to prioritize their establishment. Logistical concerns and judges’ reluctance to ‘share their assistants’ may be overcome once the efficiency gains are highlighted.⁶²² There may be different models of departments that work better than others. Elucidating and sharing these lessons could thus spur further innovations.
70. Serbia’s judicial sector still lacks a good mechanism for evaluating internal organization as a whole – and especially variations in structure and staff numbers. There are significant differences in unit productivity that deserve further study since they could provide solutions to improving the overall system performance.
    Further consideration could also be given to specialization of work. In Basic Courts in particular, specialized departments and streamlined processes could be established to deal with certain types of cases such as small claims, labor disputes, and family issues. In Misdemeanor Courts, greater specialization on customs and tax cases may be warranted. Similarly, PPOs could consider the establishment of departments and processes for the investigation and prosecution of types of cases that require specialized skills,such as fraud and sexual violence.

ii. Managing Caseloads and Workloads

71. As discussed in the Efficiency Chapter, judicial caseloads are distributed very unevenly in the Serbian judiciary, because the number of judges in the same types of courts does not correlate with the number of incoming cases, pending caseloads, or dispositions. This directly impacts court efficiency and access to justice.
72. A case weighting methodology would improve the system’s ability to allocate workloads among judges and staff. Weighted caseload standards define case complexity and the amount of judicial time that should be allocated to each case event, and develop case weights that can be used to effectively allocate human and material resources within the judiciary. Case weighting is useful to balance workloads in courts that handle different case types that require different levels of effort to resolve. By contrast, courts that handle different case types of broadly similar effort may not need such a tool and random case assignment combined with managerial oversight is sufficient. While case weighting helps, there remains some debate about the extent to which a case weighting tool would solve Serbia’s problems. See Box 18.

73. An HJC working group prepared a pilot case weighting methodology, but its work has not been endorsed. With support from USAID SPP, the working group developed case time estimates through expert opinions and collected actual case time data, then tested and adjusted both to develop a caseload analysis.⁶²³ Cases were categorized into three groups (simple, complex and very complex).

74. In Serbia, while a more sophisticated analysis is underway, an initial basic weighting by major case-type could be implemented. Lessons from the pilot could be applied, particularly its first stage of grouping cases into three categories, which was not contentious. Weights could be applied to the numbers of cases of each judge (without allocating time), to arrive at a roughly weighted number for each judge that can be compared. Over time, the system could become more sophisticated by estimating the amount of effort generated by each case type. Such an option could be considered by the HJC and SCC as an interim methodology in the short to medium term.
75. In the meantime, much progress can be made to address the unequal distribution of cases between courts without the tool. For example, it is doubtful that the enormous variation in the average caseloads of Basic Courts is based solely on the relative complexity of cases received. Under-performing courts could also be supported to improve performance to meet the system’s averages through targeted interventions. Court Presidents should also use existing systems (predominantly AVP) to analyze existing caseloads for each judge by case type. The HJC should also require AVP reports from courts on the allocation of judges to cases by case type. Where imbalances are real, files can be transferred between neighboring courts. Incentives can be offered to encourage judges to transfer (permanently or temporarily) between neighboring courts, including recognition awards, consideration for promotion and financial incentives. The current system of random case assignment could be monitored, and Court Presidents could be required to report on each occasion when they overrule the system, and the reasons for their decision. Together, such a suite of measures would improve the distribution of caseloads to a point where the variation may be due to case complexity, at which time case weighting will be ready to be applied.

iii. Work Processes and Process Re-Engineering

76. Closely related to internal organization, process re-engineering is the re-design of work patterns to produce high quality outputs more rapidly, with less effort, and at lower costs. If done successfully, process re-engineering contributes to quicker and more effective remedies for users, and reduces the burden on judges and their staff without sacrificing on quality. Process re-engineering seeks to identify and remove steps that contribute little value. At times, all that is required is a better method for organizing workloads and distributing work between judges and their staff. All these efforts can improve the work environment, and make life for courts and parties easier, reduce delays, and costs, and improve satisfaction with justice services.
77. Neither the Councils nor the SCC has a system to evaluate work processes or to re-engineer them. Individual Court Presidents use their own systems based on personal initiative or with the support of donors (see boxes in the Efficiency Chapter). Neither the SCC nor the Councils have created a unit or position to contribute to this work, nor did one exist prior in the MOJ.
78. Process re-engineering requires familiarity with current practices, knowledge of alternatives pursued in other countries, and some ingeTeanuity or imagination to see how imported or local innovations might be adopted more widely. See Box 20 below for an example of business process re-engineering that has been highly successful in the Subotica Basic Court. Western European judiciaries, as well as the more developed common law systems elsewhere, constantly make refinements to their system. Some reforms are more successful than others. However, no process is impervious to change.

79. The adoption of new procedural codes is a form of business re-engineering, but rarely have their intended aims been effective due to lack of analysis. Frequently, reforms have become a source of new problems or simply have not eliminated past ones. It is particularly critical that reformers specify the changes and benefits they propose to introduce, and that these be tracked once the code is enacted, and if legally possible, via a pilot.⁶²⁴
80. The new CPC – a radical exercise in process re-engineering – provides a recent example. In this case, reforms were based on legal principles regarding the proper role of the courts, prosecutors, and law enforcement with some influence from foreign donors, more so than on the detailed process analysis or data from within the Serbian system.625 In a positive effort, the SPC attempted to analyze the cost implications for PPOs based on grafting the budget and staffing needs of criminal investigation functions onto PPOs. However, this analysis did not account for the expanded scope of work entrusted to prosecutors, nor did it assess whether existing court allocations (or prior PPO allocations) were appropriate in the first place. Furthermore, the HJC and SPC estimates regarding personnel needs under the new CPC did not suggest a detailed exploration of organizational alternatives or available data. The implementation plans did not include a rigorous, comparative analysis of the old and proposed case trajectories, or the effects on staffing needs and task assignments, or of the impact on the timing, quantity, and quality of service delivery.
81. It is not too late for Serbia to test the effects of this reform, if it immediately and precisely defines the intended benefits and the data through which it can measure the impacts. Such testing would also permit refinements in the future, should the benefits not emerge as anticipated. Lessons from Croatia’s experience with its CPC may be instructive. The Croatian CPC introduced significant amendments, only to be partially abolished by their Constitutional Court, resulting in a partial reversion to the previous system.
82. Much re-engineering can be done less radically. An administrative change can be quite small yet can have a discernable impact in service delivery. While physical case files are still used, barcodes can facilitate their location, which may prevent files from being lost or misplaced for long periods of time. If files are scanned, copies requested by attorneys or parties can be produced more rapidly and, if permitted, delivered electronically. Similarly, statistical reports can be generated electronically and transmitted by flash drives to a central database, as is already practiced in the Misdemeanor Courts. On the administrative side, the goal is to avoid entering the same data more than once, thereby reducing workload and potential errors. The online filings and notifications (e-filing) currently under development in Serbia is a natural progression.
83. On the judicial side, redundant processes can be eliminated. Giving judges more authority to decide on what is essential and what is not can curb potential dilatory practices. Court Presidents can encourage their judges to be more assertive and proactive in their case management, and should support them to enforce the new approach. Sanctions for frivolous claims and abuse of process can be imposed and enforced. Appellate Courts can support lower courts by endorsing a more assertive stance during trials; meanwhile, they could be encouraged to amend decisions wherever possible instead of simply sending them back for retrial.

84. The judiciary should consider establishing such a process re-engineering team. The team could identify opportunities, and analyze existing processes and decision-making while learning lessons from other judiciaries. Some judiciaries, such as in the Netherlands, have introduced roving evaluation teams that periodically evaluate the effect of processes on a given number of courts, and assess how improvements in processes might be made.