In the last two pieces, we examined how efficiency defines the broad contours of your case - how long it might take, how many hearings you might have and when your first hearing might be scheduled. But once your case enters the system, another crucial dimension begins to matter: predictability.
At the outset, we must clarify that ‘predictability’ here is not predictability of outcome. Each case is unique and the way the court rules in favour of parties necessarily depends on innumerable factors. Predictability, in our context, is whether courts do what they say they will - whether your case will actually be heard on the day it’s listed and whether each appearance meaningfully advances your matter. For litigants, the absence of predictability topples their perception of courts from a functioning forum for dispensing justice to one that feels arbitrary and whimsical.
Imagine you’ve been diagnosed with an illness that requires urgent medical attention. The doctor prescribes medication and asks you to return for a follow-up in two weeks. You dutifully take your medicines, arrange your schedule and arrive at the clinic on the appointed day - only to find that the doctor isn’t available and your appointment has been postponed indefinitely.
Patients need certainty. Delays, postponements and summary dismissals wouldn’t be acceptable in healthcare. They require not just treatment, but the assurance that the treatment plan itself will unfold as promised with check-ups at regular intervals and customised attention. In all fairness, it wouldn’t be acceptable at a restaurant reservation, or while waiting for a taxi, or as you queue outside the bank for withdrawal of an amount that is rightfully yours.
This handicap is endemic to the justice system. Courts are no different. Litigants, too, deserve predictability.
Once you’re given a date of hearing, you expect the case to be called and something meaningful to happen. When this chain breaks and hearings are adjourned without progress, or postponed at the last minute, justice becomes less a service and more a waiting room.
For lawyers who travel between multiple courts and for litigants who take leave from work to attend hearings, unpredictability carries real economic and personal costs. Each missed or postponed date translates into wasted effort, loss of wages and rising uncertainty.
Predictability is, therefore, about more than calendars and cause lists. It is a measure of institutional reliability and the court’s ability to respect the time and expectations of those who approach it.
The data available today helps us understand predictability through two measurable quantities:
Time between hearings
Percentage of substantive hearings
This, however, does not help us evaluate whether the case followed a predictable trajectory or whether the hearings happened as they were scheduled. Currently, there is no data to compare “actual” hearing dates with “promised” hearing dates. This gap can be addressed by systematising the recording and dissemination of daily cause lists to reflect what was planned for the day in a court room and what actually transpired. With this caveat, let us dive deeper into the numbers we can track.
1. Time between hearings
This metric captures how frequently your case is actually taken up for a hearing once it enters the system. If you are a resident at Bombay and your case has been proceeding in Delhi, you deserve to know how often you would have to bear the expense of a flight to Delhi. The costs-related question becomes more important if you have chosen to engage a Bombay-based lawyer to represent your case before a Delhi court. The litigant has the scope to make many beneficial choices that are premised on the availability of this information - from monetary costs to opportunity costs related to the loss of work days, convenience and other logistical needs. The importance of this predictability metric cannot be understated.
Using the same method we employed for efficiency, you can calculate it easily:
From the e-Courts or High Court website, gather data on around 100 randomly chosen cases of your case type and forum.
Note the gap between successive hearings for each case.
Calculate the median time between hearings. This gives you a fair estimate of how often the court is likely to revisit your matter.
For example, if the median time between hearings in your case type is 45 days, you know that on average, your matter will be taken up roughly once every month and a half.
If you’ve ever followed a case in court, you’d realise that not every hearing moves your case forward. Many hearings end in adjournments - because one party failed to appear, or the court ran out of time, or because procedural steps weren’t complete. These are, irrespective of the reason, non-substantive hearings.
As a standard definition, think of it this way: if the hearing resulted in an outcome that moved your case ahead, that is a substantive hearing. The judge applies their mind to the merits or procedural nuances of the case to resolve a conflict, in its entirety or in part, resulting in incremental and meaningful movement towards resolution. This is a “substantive” hearing.
Whatever isn’t a substantive hearing - irrespective of whom the blame is attributable to - is a non-substantive hearing.
Calculating the percentage of substantive hearings tells you how much of your court’s time is truly productive. If only 30% of hearings are substantive, that means seven out of ten times you show up in court, nothing meaningful happens.
Together, these metrics shape real decisions. Suppose your case type has a median of 60 days between hearings and only 25% substantive hearings. This means your matter progresses meaningfully roughly once every eight months. Knowing this, you might prefer to settle, file an interim application for urgent relief, or adopt a more customised strategy that best suits your case.
A composite understanding of all these measurements that spans both efficiency and predictability offers the widest possible picture of the empirical realities surrounding the lifecycle of your case. Combined with the personal and factual circumstances unique to your situation, these insights empower you to make litigation decisions more strategically than ever before.
But this is still not the best we can do. In the final part of this series, we will explore how court data itself can get better. What fresh insights richer disclosures can unlock, and how can these improvements meaningfully reduce the pain and uncertainty that litigants experience today.
XKDR Forum has worked extensively with datasets from High Courts, Tribunals, and District Courts, producing actionable insights across all five of the metrics discussed above. More recently, they have collaborated with the High Court of Kerala as part of the PUCAR Collective in the 24x7 ON Courts initiative in Kollam, Kerala. You can read more about their work at https://xkdr.org/field/legal-system