Ohio Court Statvocate

App Name: Ohio Courts Statvocate

Shiny App to visualize and analyze county level court workflow statistics such as case lead time and work in progress (pending cases) over 10 years (2004-2013).

FOR: Judicial Branch Stakeholders such as Judges, Court Administrators, Government Officials, Citizens of Ohio

TO: Maintain court excellence in providing speedy justice, improve court resource planning, identify court cost containment opportunities, and support court accountability with transparency.

LINK: https://ojustwin.shinyapps.io/OhioCourtStats

Currently Ohio State Court Statistics are reported in a nearly 300 page Statistical Annual Report.

The data and calculations are usually presented in a tabular format which is very hard to consume by a non expert.

Any analysis, summary, or diagrams presented are inherently limited by the static document medium. Power of dynamic visualization cannot be easily be applied.

Data and analysis presented in an annual report are usually limited to the year in focus and cannot be easily seen in context of historical data and trends.

Decisions made by Judicial Branch Stakeholders without taking advantage of powerful data science techniques can at best leave cost savings on the table or at worst lead to delay in justice.

#Example calculation of average lead time for Year 20012
library(dplyr)
data = readRDS("ohiocp.rds")

inputYear <- "2012" #This comes from the slider input on the chart

df <- data %>% filter(Year == inputYear) %>% select(County, PopPerJudge, LeadtimeInMonths,Region, TotPendingDec) %>% arrange(Region) 

print(mean(df$LeadtimeInMonths))

## [1] 5.203556

The State of Ohio has done an admirable job in keeping the Court of Common Pleas efficient. At a glance, the data shows that in 2005 Erie county was an outlier in terms of high lead time of 13.3 months. 2006 saw the lead time for Cuyahoga and Brown increase. Brown county specifically had a very high number of criminal case pending beyond court guidelines. But starting 2008 the lead times settle down across most counties. Considering population per judge, Montgomery county has performed very well in keeping lead times consistently low. Looking ahead, Portage county may need some attention (specifically civil cases) with increasing population per judge and high lead time variance.

The data used in this visualization was sourced from the Annual Ohio Court Statistical Reports provided by the Supreme Court of Ohio.

The specific data used was for the overall, civil, and criminal case load for he Courts of Common Pleas, General Division. Data from any of the other court divisions was not used.

This App was built using R Shiny and extending Google Charts example provided by Joe Cheng.