On Feb. 9, the Supreme Court of Nevada made public a tool that gives residents access to caseload and disposition statistics from 2009-2014 for all of the state’s 76 trial courts. The Trial Court Statistics Tool is online, found at http://supreme.nvcourts.gov/statistics.aspx and gives the viewer a statistical and graphical representation of caseload statistics throughout Nevada’s 17 counties. It also allows for a comparison between various districts and easy maneuvering between years.
The completion of the tool stems from a decision in 1999 of the Supreme Court of Nevada to require reporting of court statistics from judicial districts to the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC). While at the beginning reporting lacked detailed information, the AOC and trial courts streamlined the process by 2009 and began to collect more detailed statistics for criminal, family, juvenile, and civil cases. In the past five years the Nevada judiciary has worked further to “generate a thorough snapshot” of the state’s workload. These statistics are published in the Annual Report of the Nevada Judiciary each year and in 2012 the National Center for State Courts Statistics projects recognized the AOC by awarding the office its Reporting Excellence award. The NCSC was especially impressed by Nevada’s commitment to reporting these detailed caseload statistics to the public.
State Court Administrator Robin Sweet believes the online tool will serve a purpose beyond providing statistics to the AOC in that the numbers generated paint a picture of the output from counties and where work is coming from within those districts. Sweet also believes the tool will be helpful “during the legislative session, as well as aid the trial courts as they prepare for their local budget planning.”
For Mineral County, the Trial Court Statistics Tool provides access and transparency into the numbers associated with various fiscal years as well as how the county’s various caseloads compare with others. The tool also provides perspective into Nevada’s 10 judicial districts and their workload overall. For example, in 2014 Mineral County had 153 of Nevada’s 5th Judicial District’s 21,002 grand total of filings. The tool also links users to a full copy of The Annual Report of the Nevada Judiciary which provides additional data.
