Indicators of judicial efficiency in comparative law

The studies of the CEPEJ (European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice) use two efficiency indicators. The first is a kind of "clearance rate" and the second is the "disposition time". Logically, the shorter the time for judging the case, the less congested the system will be.

The first indicator measures the number of cases resolved over the number of cases received. Essentially, this indicator is used to assess the capacity of a judicial system to handle the influx of court cases. The higher the index, the more the Judiciary will be able to reduce its collection . This is a rate that can be higher than 100%.

The CNJ, by the Justice in Numbers , calls this reference the demand fulfillment index (IAD), which "reached 108.2% in 2020, culminating in a reduction in the inventory by 2,096 thousand lawsuits. The segments of the State, Federal and Labor Courts exceeded the minimum desirable level of 100% in the IAD, with emphasis on the State Courts, which decreased 115.2% of new cases. In the Labor Court segment, only 7 TRTs recorded rates below 100%. In the Electoral Court, only two courts had a rate higher than 100% (TRE-DF and TRE-RR)".

In other words, in Brazil, the clearance rate is called the demand fulfillment index.

And, as in Brazil, congestion is a problem, the CNJ also calculates the congestion rate , using the sum of unsolved cases in the numerator, in view of everything that was processed in the year. This is a variation in perspective for calculating the accumulation, being an "indicator that measures the percentage of cases that remained pending solution at the end of the base year, in relation to what was processed (sum of pending and dismissed)". The higher, the worse the index, as it shows how much the collection has not been renewed.

In order for the index to be understood in our IAD, it is worth distinguishing the type of event that generates its calculation. In the case of the IAD, the relevant event is the distribution , which only occurs once in the life of each case. Thus, the IAD has as its object new processes. In contrast, In the case of the calculation of the congestion charge, the relevant event is the progress of the case , which occurs several times in the procedural life cycle.

Thus, the congestion rate has as its object processes that have progressed, becoming, in theory, subject to solution by the Judiciary. If judged, the cases change their status from pending to downloaded. In other words, the index measures everything that was moved, having the chance of being solved, but ended up not being solved. Or, to put it another way, The index measures the proportion of cases that remained pending judgment, despite having been moved .

The CNJ, by the Justice in Numbers , discloses that "the congestion rate of the Judiciary oscillated between 70.6% in 2009 and 73.4% in 2016. From that year on, the rate gradually drops until it reaches the lowest rate in the historical series in 2019, with a rate of 73%. In 2020, there was an increase in the congestion rate of around 4.3 percentage points, returning to the level of 2015."

One way to interpret the Brazilian data is to say that, Despite the recent effort to judge more than enough, there is still a liability that is difficult to reduce . As much as the Judiciary faces what arrives, it would still take, in many instances, around three years to placate the liabilities, even if no new case was distributed.

The other indicator used by CEPEJ (disposition time) refers to the time it takes to judge a case.

It is an indicator measured in days, computed from the comparison between pending and resolved facts.

In the case of Brazilians, in terms of the average time until the dismissal of a case, Justice in Numbers informs, for example, that a case takes 3 years and 10 months in the first degree and 2 years and 2 months in the second degree. That is, the sum of the knowledge and appeal phases is 6 years . But as we have always known, The biggest bottleneck is in the execution of extrajudicial titles, as it lasts 7 years and 3 months in the first degree . And the most serious case is that of tax foreclosure, as it lasts more than 1 year than other extrajudicial foreclosures.

As can be seen, it is not exactly easy to understand judicial indicators. In addition, the lack of parallel between Brazilian and foreign indicators makes comparisons even more complex.

In any case, it is possible to say that Europe's clearance rate is around 99.7%, while Brazil's may be even higher. This does not mean that the Brazilian situation is better , because apparently what happens in Brazil is a higher yield at the moment, without prejudice to a huge and persistent accumulation. After all, it is not very intuitive that, in the Brazilian case, even with an indicator of more than 100%, the judgment of the collection requires years of work - even in a hypothetical situation of suspension of distribution.

The trial time is much more relevant to understanding the health of the judicial system, because in Europe the median duration of a process is 205 days. The sentence time alone in the Brazilian case would be three times , in addition to all the appeal delay and also the satisfactory phase. This seems to be an eloquent indicator that represents the situation we are experiencing in Brazil.