A litigant’s guide to courts: How efficient is your court?

A nation prospers through the productivity and well-being of its people. Productivity, in turn, demands innovation in industry, coordination among individuals and swift, accessible forums for conciliation when disputes arise.

The Judiciary as a service provider

The law provides the framework and norms that guide these interactions. When those norms falter, the judiciary steps in to surgically smooth frictions and offer reassurance with precision and authority.

Our courts are meant to protect the pedestrian on her way home, safeguard the citizen’s right to pursue her profession in peace and preserve harmony in our markets - with equal rigour. An efficient, transparent and accountable judiciary is, therefore, a sine qua non of a modern democracy.

Lawyers and scholars often endlessly quibble over the qualitative side of justice. Assessments of fairness, impartiality and judicial independence are commonplace. The quantitative side of law and the legal system, however, remains poorly understood and inadequately studied. Questions such as: How long will my case take? When will my first hearing be? How often will I be summoned? rarely feature in discussions on reform, despite their central importance.

We often say that justice delayed is justice denied, but can we put that delay into numbers?

This is where efficiency comes in.

What does efficiency mean in the context of courts?

Imagine you’ve ordered a custom-made garment from a tailor. Before placing the order, you’d like to know how long it will take. You’d expect clarity about your first fitting, the number of times you’ll have to visit and updates as the stitching progresses. If the tailor finishes on time, with minimal inconvenience and consistent quality, you’d call that efficient service.

Now replace the tailor with the court and your garment with your case. You, the litigant, want to know how long your dispute will take to resolve, when you’ll first appear before a judge and how many times you’ll have to return before reaching a final order. Courts, like service providers, must deliver outcomes in a reasonable time frame, minimising inconvenience while maintaining fairness.

Three metrics that define court efficiency

In the context of the judiciary, efficiency refers to how effectively courts handle and resolve cases, minimising delay while maintaining quality in the decision-making process.

A court’s efficiency can be observed through measurable indicators that stand out in the public data available on our court website. These metrics tell us how swiftly a case moves from filing to disposal and how much effort that journey demands from litigants.

Three key numbers capture this idea best:

1. Time to disposal

2. Number of hearings to disposal

3. Time to first hearing

Time to disposal

A case begins when it is filed and registered with the court. From that moment until the court declares it “disposed,” the clock is ticking. The total number of days between these two points is your time to disposal. This is the most comprehensive measure of judicial efficiency. Time to disposal is a direct reflection of how long litigants must wait for justice. 

Suppose you file a civil suit to recover 1,000 rupees. If the disposal time for similar suits in your district is 10 years, by the time you get the amount back, its value would have depreciated to just 463 rupees, at 8% cost of capital. You may be better off settling the matter out of court, even if the compromise fetches you only an amount of 800 rupees rather than waiting for this systemic pendency to erode the value of your suit. In other words, the time to disposal informs your strategic and financial decisions before you even file.

Number of hearings to disposal

A hearing is the smallest, indivisible, observable unit in a case. Each hearing represents a tangible point of engagement between you and the judicial system. Likewise, since several lawyers charge on a ‘per hearing’ basis, every day of hearing that doesn’t move the case ahead is a day worth a lawyer’s fee unjustifiably charged on the litigant. For many litigants, this is the number that matters most. The difference between being summoned to court twice a year versus twenty times a year can mean the difference between affordability and exhaustion.

Time to first hearing

In several types of cases, the first hearing is crucial. For instance, bail applications, injunctions or intellectual property suits are cases that are laced with immediacy and deft action from courts. A prompt first hearing signals responsiveness, but at the same time, appearances can be deceiving.

For instance, the Delhi High Court mandates a first hearing within a few days of filing, but this is often a procedural formality. The Bombay High Court, by contrast, may take longer, but over time might match with the Delhi High Court in terms of total number of hearings. These nuances are best learned by studying court specific rules of practice and seeking insights from practitioners specialising in your court of interest. 

How can you calculate these numbers?

As was mentioned in our introductory piece, all the necessary data for this analysis is public. The e-Courts portal and High Court websites maintain detailed records of filings, hearings and disposals.

To find your court’s efficiency indicators, this is what you can do:

1. Visit the e-Courts or relevant High Court website.

2. Select a state and a suitable district within the state that you wish to study.

3. Use Court Services → Case Type → Filter for Disposed Cases.

4. Select your court/judge of interest and pick a year.

5. Randomly pick about 100 disposed cases of the same case type.

6. Note their filing and disposal dates and perform a simple subtraction to arrive at your time to disposal across these 100 cases. 

A very simple and straightforward spreadsheet entry should do this magic for you! To get a single representative figure, we would advise that you use the median rather than a mean average. This avoids distortion from outliers - cases that ended unusually fast or dragged on for years. The same approach works for calculating the number of hearings or time to first hearing. 

Example: The median time to disposal for writ petitions is just half of the mean time to disposal. This is because of extreme outliers that push the arithmetic mean afar from the ideal central tendency.

Plunging deeper with precision

Your dataset and its representative value gets better as it grows larger in an increasingly randomised manner. So if you wish to better the precision of the single number that you churn out through this method, the broader your sample, the better your result. 

There is an invisible bias that creeps in with this method but it can be mitigated. This dataset will only include disposed cases, which means pending ones remain unseen. To understand this better, imagine 100 cases are filed on a particular day, of which 50 are disposed of in 5 years. Testing the time to disposal and number of hearings in 2030, you’d at best capture the 50 cases that were lucky enough to get resolved. You don’t really capture the unfortunate set of cases that don’t find themselves disposed. 

Statisticians use a technique called survival analysis to address this - a method borrowed from medical research that shows the likelihood that a case “survives” (remains pending) over time. 

See the graph below for instance. It shows the survival curves for suits, summary suits and commercial suits at the Bombay High Court. You can read this graph as follows:

At any point in time ‘x’ years, ‘y’ percentage of cases are disposed of. This means (100-y) percent of cases continue to survive in the system.

But for most litigants and lawyers, the simpler median-based approach provides a reliable approximation.

Remember also that efficiency varies by case type and forum. A civil money suit behaves differently from a criminal writ, even if both arise from similar statutes. Knowing the trends for your specific case type in the specific court of your interest helps you set realistic expectations.

What comes next

Once you’ve understood how efficiently your court processes cases, the next question is: How predictably does it do so? Can you trust that your case will be heard when listed, and that hearings will move you closer to resolution?

We’ll explore these questions in our next article, where we look at predictability in the justice system and how to measure it.

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 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