Achieving High Performance: A Framework for Courts

The High Performance Court Framework suggests a series of flexible steps courts can take to integrate performance improvement into its ongoing operations. The steps include focusing on key administrative principles that clarify high performance, understanding how a court's managerial culture can promote common goals and collegial cooperation, developing the capacity to measure performance and learning to use the results for procedural refinements and communication with a variety of stakeholders. Taken together the steps form a functional system or quality cycle that courts can follow in enhancing the quality of the administration of justice. Courts are no different than other institutions: It often takes a crisis for courts to reconsider their existing practices. The prospect of a dramatic loss of funding facing many courts today is a threat to their functional integrity that is greater than at any time in recent history. There is a need for an effective response to the fiscal shock, but unfortunately many courts, rather than innovate, will simply react. When courts are in reactive mode, solutions tend to be blunt fixes—such as staff furloughs, suspension of jury trials or cut backs in court hours. Some courts will employ the Washington Monument Budget Strategy: " If we do not get adequate funding, we'll close the... " Despite the short-term glow that might come from such confrontations, this type of solution is seldom to anyone's satisfaction. In contrast, some courts will adapt to this crisis creatively and flexibly with an eye toward preserving or even enhancing the quality of the administration of justice. Courts that are in fact well run and are perceived to be well run will be well funded— even in periods of tight budgets. The rest will be told to do more with less. Hence, the financial challenge courts face today demands creative thinking. The courts that will flourish are those willing to implement changes they may not even have considered absent a crisis. Many people hold a belief that technology can save courts. Without a doubt information technology is a key to helping handle the steadily increasing amount of paperwork in courts. However, the promise of greater efficiency through technological innovation has not always been fully realized despite considerable investment. The spotty history of efficiency gains suggests that adapting information technologies to better organize and conduct court business has not been understood " We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate …