Finding Needle in the Case-Stack: Effective Remote Monitoring of Courts

Delay in the judicial processes and pendency of existing cases is an old problem that has defied easy solutions in Pakistan. Most cases are trapped in the system due to a huge backlog of cases, excessive litigation in urban areas, corruption by the court staff and lack of proper monitoring of the functioning of courts. Efficient supervision and monitoring of courts can help in resolving some of the key problems in the system. We present preliminary results from a novel case record-keeping, management and monitoring solution that is able to meet several key performance goals of the National Judicial Policy. The overall aim of the work is to facilitate the work of the monitoring judges by helping them find the proverbial needle in the haystack and not get deluged by the volume of data routinely produced by the typical case-management systems. In this paper, we explore the application of intrusion detection techniques, such as the statistical anomaly detection schemes, to case management systems and present the results from our extensive case studies. Our proposed system, now in pilot, shows high accuracy in flagging anomalous cases, reduces the overall volume of information generated by the system and can help target several of the key reasons behind case pendency while bringing much needed transparency to the overall case-flow.