⇒ The 2024 Appropriation Act instructed the Court of Appeals of Virginia to “examine options for workload metrics that could be used to objectively determine the necessary number of positions, including judgeships and personnel in the Clerk’s Office and the Office of the Chief Staff Attorney."

⇒ The Court asked the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission to study its workload and develop appropriate metrics for the Court to use to determine staffing needs.

⇒ The Commission completed its study and made several recommendations relating to some of the challenges it faced in analyzing the Court’s data. The Commission’s recommendations underscore the critical need to modernize the Court’s case management and electronic filing systems, which are not currently integrated.

⇒ The Commission identified factors that significantly impacted the average time a case spent in each of the three main divisions of the Court: 1) the Clerk’s Office; 2) the Chief Staff Attorney’s Office; and 3) Judicial Chambers.

⇒ The Commission also developed an excel tool for internal Court use that calculates staffing needs based on increases or decreases to certain salient factors.

⇒ Changing the staffing level of any one division of the Court will affect the entire Court. Accordingly, staffing scenarios should account for all of the Court’s divisions, keeping in mind the ripple effects and potential bottlenecks that increased production in one division will have on the workflow of the Court as a whole.

⇒ The Court recommends investing in an integrated case management system for the appellate courts and allowing the Court to further monitor the statistical trends from emerging data. Including the data that would result from those improvements would improve the data set and refine the specific benchmark inputs needed to assess future staffing needs accurately.

⇒ The Commission’s detailed study and report support the Court’s efforts to monitor certain data and statistical benchmarks over the first three years of its expanded jurisdiction. The results of the study validate the organizational changes that the Court has made to streamline case processing and make the Court’s systems more efficient.