4.5: Case Load Information
Release more information about the Department’s case load. Other Information:
Significant Court Filings. As the Executive Branch’s lawyer, much of the Department’s most important work occurs in the courtroom,
and much of that work is in the form of written papers filed in court. It is in our court filings that significant policy
and legal positions are explained. The public will often learn about these filings from news reports, but those reports rarely
give adequate context, and even more rarely give direct access to the very actions they are describing. Federal courts and
numerous commercial services provide access to the documents, but often only at a cost and regularly only with some delay.
The Department is committed to making these papers more readily available. This information should be available to the public,
so that Americans can review the documents themselves and gain a full understanding of the Department’s actions. Given the
thousands of papers that DOJ files in courts across the country every day, it is not possible to make every brief available,
and the Department’s litigating offices should welcome requests from the public to send copies of particular public filings
that are of interest. In order to maximize access to the Department’s most significant case filings, however, the Department
will begin to make significant court filings available through its Web site when they are filed. In addition, the Office of
Public Affairs, when presented with a press inquiry, will offer to provide relevant court filings, so that reporters will
have the opportunity to see the rationale for the Department’s positions. Case Data. In tens of thousands of cases across
the country, working for scores of federal agencies, the Department handles litigation in dozens of areas: from prosecuting
criminals to defending statutes passed by Congress, from enforcing civil rights law to defending federal agencies in contract
disputes, and from pursuing tax cheats to protecting competitive markets. To manage their voluminous dockets, the Department’s
several litigating components each maintain case management systems that collect certain basic information about their cases.
As those systems are currently maintained, the data contained in them is of little collective value: cases that are jointly
handled across multiple components are often tracked in multiple, separate systems; each component relies on different definitions
of fundamental concepts, resulting in data that is consistent within a particular component but of little value when combined
with data from other components; and the data is collected not for purposes of statistical analysis, but to track pending
cases and matters. The Department is in the development stages of a new platform that will, in certain ways, improve the data
being collected. The purpose of the new system will still be to assist the Department to manage its workload, not to provide
research‐quality information in every conceivable area. Moreover, releases of case management data from a future system will
undoubtedly require significant processing, not least to ensure that it does not compromise privacy, investigative or national
security interests, and the costs of that processing will be weighed against the data’s potential value. Nonetheless, a single,
enterprise‐wide system would have the potential to avoid some of the problems that reduce the value of current Department‐wide
information. As the development process continues, the Department will consider whether there are aspects of the data that
the system collects that could be of value to the public. Where there are cost‐effective steps that will improve the data
being collected without compromising the system’s core purpose, the Department should pursue them.
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