RESEARCH PROGRAMMES

The costs of delays in a sample of specialist courts

On 21 December 2006, the General Council of the Judiciary and the Rafael del Pino Foundation signed a collaboration agreement under which the two institutions agreed to work together to conduct research entitled “Estimation of the costs of delays in a sample of specialist family courts”. This study, focused on the courts of Madrid, was commissioned, by joint agreement, from the Foundation for Studies of Applied Economics (FEDEA) [Fundación de Estudios de Economía Aplicada]. The research has consisted in validating the model for calculating the actual length of different judicial proceedings using the data of the General Council of the Judiciary (Judicial Statistics) and the reports prepared by the Court Activity Planning and Analysis Department, and in performing a sample analysis of the costs of court delays starting with family courts. A model for evaluating court costs was also designed.

The conclusions reached are as follows:

• • The duration of family proceedings in specialist courts is 5% less than in non-specialist mixed courts;
• • The workload in family courts is not even throughout the year. There is a peak in the filing of contested proceedings in the last quarter of the year and the peak in proceedings by mutual consent occurs in July;
• • Most of the family courts work load consists of proceedings by mutual consent, as opposed to contested proceedings;
• • This analysis of family proceedings has identified a number of incidents or subproceedings, to use the terminology employed by the survey, which constitute real bottlenecks. It has also made it possible to detect variables that have a big impact on the overall calculation of the length of proceedings and indicate the advisability of extending the analysis to cover all legal proceedings.