Iowa Court Clerk and Court Support Staff Workload Assessment Study 2016 Final Report, May 2017

(2017) Iowa Court Clerk and Court Support Staff Workload Assessment Study 2016 Final Report, May 2017. Legislative Services Agency (Legislative Service Bureau)

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Abstract

Legislatures and the public increasingly call upon the courts and other government agencies to be more efficient – to “operate more like a business.” One of the challenges for courts in responding to this demand is determining the appropriate number of staff required to provide high quality services. Since 1993, Iowa’s judicial branch has relied on a data-driven weighted caseload formula to establish the baseline needs for staffing clerk of court offices. The 1993 weighted caseload formula was based on a work-time study involving clerks’ staff in a sample of 32 counties (16 collected data on non-case-related work time and 16 collected data on case-related work-time). A decade later, in 2003, the state court administrator (SCA) organized a new weighted caseload study in clerks’ offices that involved collection of work-time data in the clerk of court offices in all 99 counties (clerks’ staff in 25 counties collected data on non-case-related work time; and staff in 74 counties collected data on case-related work-time). That formula provided the basis for determining authorized staffing levels in clerks’ offices statewide until recently.