2 The Data Revolution in Justice 22 A bureaucratic strand of literature evaluates case flow management and staffing adequacy, highlighting the importance of management practices in court performance. For courts to move through their dockets quickly, Buscaglia and Dakolias (1996) already proposed the adoption of data-driven decision-making, a method tested by Ecuador and Argentina during a period of skyrocketing pendency rates in the 1990s. Among the most constructive changes are active management of cases, clear timelines for processing, and adequate mechanisms to monitor progress. Dakolias and Said (1999) study the bottom-up approach to implementing judicial reforms. Lessons from the pilot projects on improving the judiciary in Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Ukraine demonstrate that judicial reforms work best when implemented in lower courts. A change in culture and management practices and support from stakeholders from different sectors of society, including legal professionals, businesses, and NGOs, also enhance these reforms’ reach.

Databases may also be used to diagnose the overall functioning of the system and the capacity of different legal actors involved. For example, Carmignani and Giacomelli (2009) argue that the number of lawyers has a large positive effect on civil litigation across Italian provinces from 2000 to 2005. This conclusion is challenged by Yeung and Azevedo (2011), who find that human or material resources do not fully explain the differences in efficiency across Brazilian courts. Instead, it correlated more closely with court management practices. Mitsopoulos and Pelagidis (2010) suggest that the main problems in the Greek judicial system are actually failings in the system’s own design: insufficient judicial organization and accountability, excessively burdensome procedures, and lack of competition in the provision of legal services. Moreover, Coviello, Ichino, and Persico (2015) show that judges carry out work in short, interrupted segments–what they define as task juggling. When judges juggle tasks, it lowers their productivity substantially. In particular, those judges who juggle more trials at once instead of working sequentially on few of them over time, take longer to complete their portfolios of cases.

These diagnostics may be an essential tool to understand the main areas for improvement in the justice system. The establishment of comprehensive databases and performance indicators are the first step towards understanding what works, or what needs to be improved, in a country’s justice system. Policy-making can then benefit from targeted goals and recommendations that are based on solid measurements.

# **Experimentation**

Apart from measurement and diagnostics, data systems provide the ideal opportunity to experiment with policy options in order to rigorously evaluate the impact of justice reforms. Innovative policies can be implemented in a staggered fashion to provide the opportunity to rigorously evaluate them. Alternatively, performance incentives and other cost-effective measures can be tested via randomized controlled trials (RCTs). For policies that can have a relevant long-term impact, iteratively testing and evaluating their impact through RCTs can lead to a better understanding of the benefits and trade-offs of such policies.

Legal scholars and judges have long made arguments about laws and regulations and their arguments with theories about the effects of these legal rules. A particularly challenging dimension of studying the effects of legal rules is that many other aspects of society are correlated with the presence of legal rules, so it is difficult to determine cause or effect. Much like medicine a century ago, prior to clinical trials, theories most often lacked rigorous causal evidence.

Randomizing judicial decisions, however, violates our notion of justice and equal treatment before the law. On the other hand, randomizing case assignment to judges generates a retrospective “clinical trial”, the first example of which was only published as recently as 2006 (Kling, 2006), where the policy question was whether longer sentence lengths affected subsequent labor outcomes