A Weighted Caseload System is Coming
by Clayton Perkins, Capital Appellate Defender
It is a truism that public defenders have excessive caseloads. However, quantifying what is an excessive caseload is remarkably difficult. In 1973, 10 years after Gideon v. Wainwright, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals put out the first and only national public defense caseload standards, set at 150 felony cases a year. Since then, developing updated caseload standards has happened at the state level. Last fall, Executive Director Cessna formed a committee of various BIDS attorneys, including myself, and one Board member with criminal-law experience, with the goal of developing a system to better understand attorney caseloads. This committee has aimed to provide updated caseload standards specifically for Kansas.
The first step in the process was to gather as much data as possible on existing public defender caseload systems. This involved meeting with individuals who had worked on caseload standards in other states, such as NAPD Executive Director Ernie Lewis, and Mary Fox, the Missouri State Public Defender. The committee also reviewed existing systems that various BIDS offices currently use for tracking caseloads. Finally, the committee reviewed over a dozen studies conducted in other states regarding manageable and ethical caseload standards.
Studies using the Delphi Method are the go-to for developing caseload standards. The Delphi Method is a system under which a panel of experts is surveyed over several rounds on a topic, then given a chance to revise their estimates based on the overall survey results, eventually reaching a consensus answer. It was developed during the Cold War as a means for making reliable estimates in fields where direct data is unavailable. Public defender caseload standards are a good example of such an area because a survey of existing caseloads just tells us what current caseloads are, rather than what they should be to ensure that every indigent person is effectively represented.
Even though conducting a Kansas Delphi study would be too time and cost intensive right now, the committee used the methodology and data from the six most recent state Delphi workload studies from Rhode Island (2017), North Carolina (2019), Colorado (2017), Indiana (2020), Louisiana (2017), and Michigan (2019) to develop a weighted caseload system for BIDS.
After the research, it was clear that the first step in developing caseload standards was to create a system to understand attorney caseloads in a more meaningful way than the 1973 standard of “felony cases.” That is where the “weighted” part of the caseload system comes in. The weighting is done by dividing the generic “felony case” into meaningful categories called “case types” which are made up of groups of charged offenses that have roughly similar average complexity levels. Those case types are then assigned a relative value based on their complexity called “case units.” Ultimately, that system then allows an attorney’s caseload to be calculated in a number of “case units” estimating a rough scale of their overall workload, and can be used in addition to existing systems that just look at the number of felonies assigned to each attorney.
Developing both the case types and corresponding case unit values for Kansas was done through a mixture of recommendations based on the extensive criminal defense experience of the various committee members, and a comparison to the data in the six Delphi studies. In developing case categories, individual committee members independently recommended categories based on their practice experience that were then compared to the case categories used in the Delphi studies. The results were quite similar: both committee members and the Delphi studies developed case categories that included homicide offenses; high, medium, and low level felonies; and probation revocations. Additional categories were added to encompass Kansas-unique crimes like Jessica’s Law cases, which were not present in the studies in other states. That same process was then followed for developing the case unit values: utilizing independent recommendations based on experience, and the results from the Delphi studies. The results were again remarkably similar, with both the experienced defense attorneys, and the averaged results from the Delphi studies resulting in a scale from 1 case unit for a low level felony up to 8 case units for homicide offenses. Once we saw that conventional wisdom and the existing data were lining up, it was easy to follow that model for the remaining case categories and case-unit values. Finally, the committee also recommended that, in addition to case units assigned based solely on the case type, there be a system for additional “enhancement” units for a few factors that increase the complexity of the case, such as when there is a total of four or more counts charged in the case, or when the client requires an interpreter for communications.
Once the committee had the new weighted caseload system on paper, the next step was to test it out in some of the offices, which happened in April and May of 2021. This provided data on current attorney workloads under the weighted caseload system, as well as feedback from the offices on things that were or were not working with the system. And, after incorporating that feedback and data, the committee was able to finalize the weighted caseload system earlier this fall, with the goal of having it implemented through the existing Access Database tracking system later this year or in early 2022.
While having better caseload tracking through a weighted caseload system may not seem flashy, it is the start of a new, more data-driven method for understanding excessive caseloads in Kansas. In an office-specific sense, it will give supervisors a new tool for evaluating caseloads and making case assignments in manageable and equitable ways. In an agency-wide sense, it will provide a new way for the Board to understand relative workloads in offices, beyond the raw number of felony cases assigned. This can help BIDS allocate resources to the offices where they are most needed, and better understand when offices need to shut down. Finally, it will allow BIDS to quantify just how excessive attorney caseloads are in terms of the cases we are handling, and in comparison to other state systems.