Best Practices for Analyzing E-Filing Data
March 05, 2025 by Stevie Poole
Court staff often have gut feelings when pinpointing the root of workflow constraints. Turning gut into fact, patterns in data can be used to validate or invalidate those feelings and set proper expectations for future decisions.
In a recent webinar hosted by the National Association of Court Management, Caitlin Reddy Colangelo, deputy chief information officer for eCourts, Massachusetts Trial Court, shared her perspective on how centralized court data, specifically on electronic filings, has shaped their decision-making. She offered insights into why they started analyzing e-filing data, the impact they’ve experienced as a result, and strategies for creating a culture founded on data-driven decisions.
Drivers for Analyzing E-Filing Data
Historically, courts have struggled to leverage data because it’s difficult to visualize and use in a way that is going to drive meaningful change. These sentiments are reflected in a recent Tyler survey of court leaders, where 55% of respondents say their biggest challenge with collecting and using data is that it resides in multiple, disconnected systems.
For the commonwealth of Massachusetts, the first step toward connecting those systems for increased visibility into the court system was to surface the data of just one source — their e-filing management system.
Having received nearly 800,000 cases in the 2024 fiscal year, and with expectations from leadership that data be available to aid in the decision-making process, the Massachusetts Trial Court recognized the need “to become more modern and digital.” Centralizing their data to a single location drove their ability to accurately analyze operational workflows.
Benefits of Tracking E-Filing Data
Dynamic, up-to-date, and centralized e-filing data helps court leaders:
- Address bottlenecks based on reviewer productivity and processing times for each filing type
- Decrease rejection rates by identifying common trends or issues among filers and communicating them to the filing community
- Enhance staff training by spotting consistent deviations from processes
- Increase access and create better experiences by making data-driven decisions about what guided pre-packaged forms, benefiting unrepresented filers based on insight into trends over time
“Tracking e-filing data has given us insight and granularity into the data,” emphasized Reddy Colangelo. “We can see the breakdown between initial filings, subsequent filings, the total number of documents filed in an envelope, as well as the envelope processing time. It’s been eye-opening and helps us understand the complexity of our work.”
Impact and Examples of Measuring E-Filing Data
Access to clean, trustworthy, and secure data is key to data-driven policy.
Using the filing rejection reason, or lack thereof, Reddy Colangelo and her team were able to shape policy decisions for e-filing best practices. “Based on the data, we came up with how filings should be submitted across the board, not just jurisdiction-specific. When or if filings are rejected, there’s policy behind it,” she said.
Reddy Colangelo also used the data to initiate conversations and better understand jurisdiction data. For example, at first glance, a specific case type appeared to be under review much longer than the typical review period. After speaking with analysts, the case type in question required additional research before a decision could be made and wasn’t cause for concern. This helped Reddy Colangelo better understand the “why” behind this outlier in the performance metrics so she could clearly explain it to leadership.
Strategies for Building a Data-Driven Decision-Making Culture
Especially in the public sector, data is expected to make decisions. Strategies to cultivate a culture for data-driven decision-making include:
- Emphasizing jurisdictional changes, like population growth's impact on case volume, to help offices understand the need for data and impact on court resources
- Empowering stakeholders, like judges, attorneys, and other justice partners, to obtain the data points they need to solve problems facing the court
- Providing training to meet staff where they are on their data journey — not everyone will have the same comfort level with understanding and breaking down data
- Starting simple and building complexity over time, offering necessary guidance along the way to build trust with the data
Conclusion
Visualizing agency operations with centralized e-filing metrics helps courts measure efficiency, foster data-driven decisions, and improve justice partner and constituent experiences. “Our ability to use technology creates a better relationship with [justice stakeholders]. Being able to drill down quickly is bolstering trust in our trial court,” Reddy Colangelo proudly proclaimed.