2019

A Flawed Approach to Courthouse Planning

Jim Hargreaves
Amicus Curiae Consulting
4/10/2019
 The Flawed Approach to Courthouse Planning by Lane County
Authored by Jim Hargreaves
Introduction

The City of Eugene and Lane County spent three years and had to file three lawsuits before they
could figure out how to clear the title to what is known as “the butterfly lot” so plans could
move ahead for building a new city hall and county courthouse.

While this litigation was dragging on, the county moved ahead with “planning” for the
courthouse. After three more years and two expensive and severely flawed planning studies,
the county now seeks funding for a proposed new courthouse that would be more than two-
and one-half times the size of the current facility, going from the existing 115,000 square feet
to 297,000 square feet. What follows is an explanation regarding the substantial flaws in the
two planning studies that has led the county to plan for far more space than the courts
currently need, or will ever need in the foreseeable future, and which in turn has driven the
cost of this proposed facility far beyond what it needs to be.

National Center for State Courts Analysis

The county first hired the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) to do a needs assessment for
the courthouse as a whole, which included space for the courts, the sheriff’s office, the district
attorney’s office and space for parole and probation. While the space allocations for the
agencies other than the courts are certainly suspect given the flawed assessment regarding the
court needs, it is the space for the courts that is the focus of this paper.

Despite the county’s assertion that NCSC study was, “A qualitative analysis of feasible and
innovative changes and improvements to services that took into account applicable national
best practices of court administration and local operation initiatives was conducted”, that is
simply not the case. While the NCSC was completely competent to do the assessment that the
county needed to have done, in this instance, for reasons unknown, it utterly failed to do the
thorough assessment necessary to accurately assess the needs for the courts.

As to the courts, the bulk of the analysis driving NCSC’s space requirements estimates was
based almost exclusively on projecting historical data regarding case filings, and makes the
assumption that there would be a courtroom for every judge. While case filing data has some
impact on projected space needs, the really important measures for determining how many
courtrooms are needed, and the configuration of those courtrooms (12-person jury, 6-person
jury, and no jury), is not a simplistic determination.

NCSC explained their recommendation as follows: “It is planned that each court floor of the
new courthouse will have a mix of courtrooms that can handle a range of case types (i.e. jury
trials, non-jury trials, in-custody parties, etc.). For example, given a floorplate with six
courtrooms, the array of courtrooms could include 1 large jury courtroom (2,000 sf) for high

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profile and multi-party trials, 3 standard criminal trial capable jury courtrooms (1,600 sf) with
access to a secure holding area and prisoner elevator, and 2 small non-jury, non-criminal
courtrooms (1,250sf).”

This chart shows the existing courtrooms and NCSC’s recommended additions.

As can be seen, NCSC recommended the addition of one non-jury, one standard and one large
civil/criminal courtroom. It also recommended that the size of courtrooms be expanded
considerably.

What NCSC (as well as architects Robertson Sherwood DLR) failed to understand is that the
issue of space needs (and number of judges a court needs as well) is driven primarily by the
interplay of at least seven different factors; 1. The current number of judges in the court, 2. The
number of cases the court has to deal with on an ongoing basis, 3. The mix of the types of cases
the court has to deal with, 4. The number of cases tried, 5.The average length of time it takes to
try various types of cases, 6. The presiding judge’s and docket clerk’s management of the
scheduling of cases, and 7. The diligence of the trial judges in dealing with their work load.
Inexplicably, in its analysis the NCSC only looked at one tiny aspect of the volume of work of the
court, and how many judges are on the court. There is a wealth of highly relevant statistical
data easily available on line from the Office of the State Court Administrator which, if properly
analyzed, would have provided a far clearer and more accurate picture of the work of the court
that should have been analyzed in making the space need assessment. NCSC completely
ignored that data.

While the above statistical analysis should have been done by NCSC, two of the important
factors set forth above, the presiding judge’s and docket clerk’s management of the scheduling
of cases, and the diligence of the trial judges in dealing with their work load, could not have
been evaluated by that analysis. Those two issues required a separate collection of data by
court management specialists, which would have included interviewing judges, the presiding
judge, the docket clerk, and various court personnel. It would also have required a close review
of the way all of these people carry out their tasks. This additional critical analysis was
completely ignored by NCSC. Without this vital information, the statistical analysis done by

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NCSC is really of no value. The statistical analysis of case data is a necessary but not sufficient
basis upon which to analyze space needs and the potential need for additional judges.
Based on their flawed analysis, the NCSC reached the erroneous—and ultimately very costly—
conclusion that over the next 50 years the court would need three additional judges, for a total
of 18. To NCSC’s credit, they did indicate that not all courtrooms needed to be full-sized, 14-
person jury facilities. That said, as the analysis below will show, while NCSC got the concept of
using courtrooms of varying sizes right, they applied that concept exactly backwards to arrive at
a courtroom mix that does not match the workload of the court.

Robertson Sherwood-DLR Scoping Study

Following on the heels of the NCSC study, the county then hired the local architecture firm of
Robertson Sherwood working together with DLR (RS/DLR), a national-level architectural firm, to
do what was styled a “scoping study”. This, in essence, was an architectural study of all of the
space that would be needed in the new courthouse to accommodate the functions of the
various agencies that would occupy the building, based on the work of the NCSC.
Unfortunately, at least as to the courts, this study turned out to only amplify the errors of the
NCSC study.

While the NCSC at least recognized that all new courtrooms in the facility did not need to be
full-sized, 14-person jury courtroomsi, RS/DLR (architects and not court management experts)
ignored that finding and substituted its own assessment that, “…(I)n lieu of providing
specialized courtrooms of varying sizes, the program uses a standard courtroom module in
order to allow each judicial officer to handle multiple case types…”. That “standard courtroom
module” means that each judge will be provided with a full-sized, 14-person jury courtroom.

The approach taken by RS/DLR is particularly mystifying when, on a blog on the web site for
DLR, Todd Orr of that firm wrote the following:

“Courtroom Spaces
Courtrooms are the heart of any courthouse. They are also the most expensive spaces and demand
the most floor area. So the right questions will address both how the facility is designed as well as
the types of processes that may impact the space needs:

• Can courtrooms be shared between judges?

• Do all courtrooms need a jury box?
• How many spectators will be accommodated?
• How many counsel tables are needed in the well area?
• Can smaller hearing rooms take the place of a full-sized courtroom for certain case types?

Answers to these questions determine the size of the courtroom and the flexibility of the
courtroom to serve a variety of case types or be limited to very specific proceedings.”

The chart below shows what the architects used for their scoping and upon which the county
has relied.

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The chart below shows what the architects used for their scoping and upon which the county
has relied.

Robertson Sherwood DLR Scoping for Courtrooms

SqFt Num Gross

Total 40,268 square feet

Total square footage for 18 courtroom sets: 40,268
Total square footage for 18 standard courtrooms alone: 29,700
Total square footage of 14 existing courtrooms alone: 14, 260
Increase in square footage over existing courtrooms 26,008

No attempt has been made to compare total square footage of courtroom sets because there is
no data available as to the existing size and number auxiliary spaces such as jury rooms,
attorney conference rooms etc.

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 The Fallacy that Population Growth Drives Case Filings

Lane County Population Data

Lane County Population 2001: 325,069
Lane County Population 2018: 375,120
Numerical Increase: 50,057
Per-Cent Increase 2001-2018: 15.4%

Lane County Circuit Court Case Data

Data Type 2001 2018 Pre-Cent Change

Cases Filed 36,823 33,112 -1
Cases Terminated 35,958 34,120 -.5
Cases Tried--Total 1,244 885 -29
Cases Tried--Jury 151 85 -44
Cases Tried-Court 1,093 800 -27

This chart demonstrates the fallacy of using population trend data to predict court case filing.
The base year 1991 was used as that is the oldest data available for comparison for all data
types.

Cases Filed and Terminated Data

As can be seen above, from 2001 to 2018 the population of Lane County increased 15.4%.
During the same period of time, the total number of cases filed and terminated stayed almost
flat, showing only a .5% and 1% drop respectively. Thus, the popular generally assumption that
as the population of the county increases the number of case filings in the courts will be
expected also increase, is shown to be fallacious, as actually measured over the last 18 years.

Cases Tried Data

Another very interesting, and extremely important example of this fallacy is found in looking at
the data regarding the number of cases actually tried by the court. As can be seen above, while
the number of cases that the court terminated each year remained essentially flat from 2001-
2018, the number of cases that were terminated by an actual trial, either to a judge or a jury,
dropped dramatically. Total case tried dropped by 29%, while jury trials decreased by 44% and
judge trials dropped 27%.

The cases tried data is critically important in determining how many and what types of
courtroom are needed by a court. There are generally three types of courtroom configurations;
6-person jury, 12-person jury and non-jury. The space needs for each of these types of
courtrooms vary, with the largest courtroom being needed for a 12-person jury trial and the
smallest being a non-jury courtroom where cases are heard by just a single judge.

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Case Data and Courtroom Needs in Lane County
To fully understand the importance of the above data, it is necessary to understand something
about the work of the Lane County Circuit Court that is probably not readily apparent to most
people.

Referring to the chart above, we see that the court is disposing of around 35,000 cases a year.
However, historically, only about 3% of all of the cases are disposed of through some sort of a
trial. So, what happened to the rest of the cases? The answer is that the vast majority of them
(well over 90%) were settled between the parties, with a judge only signing a final document
agreed to by the parties. Another very small per-cent were disposed of by a ruling of judge on
some legal issue that decided the case without a trial, or maybe a sentencing hearing in a
criminal case. Of all of these cases disposed of, the vast majority do not even require the judge
to be in a courtroom. Documents can, and often are simply signed in the judges’ office. A
number of these cases do in fact require a hearing short of a trial. However, none of these
hearings require the use of a courtroom designed for a jury. Thus, the vast amount of time
spent by a judge does not require the use of a courtroom, let alone a jury, courtroom. The
reality is that Jury trials are a very tiny portion of the work that judges do, and thus jury-sized
courtrooms are a tiny part of the space needs for the court.

Lane County Planning

Unfortunately, the type of data analysis set out above was not done by the county, or either of
the companies hired by the county to help them assess the needs of the court and thus they
arrived at exceedingly inaccurate understandings of the space needs of the court in the
proposed new courthouse. As a result, the space needs for the proposed courthouse are grossly
overstated and thus the calculated project cost is also grossly exaggerated.

A Realistic Sizing for Courtrooms

From my analysis of the work of the court, it is my belief that what the court really needs in the
way of courtroom space is probably four jury courtrooms and eight or nine non-jury
courtrooms.
If we use the sizing for the four jury courtrooms that the architects used above, the courtrooms
(excluding jury rooms since we have no figures for that from NCSC) would come out to about
8,096 square feet, total. Assuming nine non-jury courtrooms at 1,000 square feet each (smaller
than what NCSC recommended but a very adequate size in my opinion), that adds another
9,000 feet; for a total square footage of 17,096. This would be an increase of 4,836 square feet
of courtroom space over the court’s existing combined square footage of approximately
13,260. It would be a decrease of about 19,516 square feet from the architects’ proposed space
of about 36,612 square feet for 18 courtrooms.

While the reduction in size—and therefor cost—is a very significant issue, the really important
consideration from a court perspective, is that the square footage to be built would be
distributed in a fashion that actually fits the needs of the court, given the very few jury trials
conducted.

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An example of one way that courtrooms could be laid out on a given floor can be seen in the
diagram below. Any decision about the actual configuration will have to be adapted to the
actual footprint of the building when it is finally designed.

“A” Potential Cluster Layout for A Court Floor

The final comparison that needs to be done is to look at size and configuration of the existing
court rooms as well as the changes proposed by NCSC, Robertson-Sherwood, and this author.

Again, the comparisons will only be as to number of courtrooms and their sizes as there is no
data available as to the ancillary spaces such as jury rooms, attorney conference rooms etc.

Proposed Number and Size of Courtrooms Compared to Existing Facility

Current Courtrooms Number Sq. Ft. Total Sq. Ft. NCCS Proposed Number Sq. Ft. Total Sq. Ft.
Adm/Arraignment 1 1,330 1,330 Am/Arraignment 1 1,900 1,900
Civil/Criminal 1 1,330 1,330 Civil/Criminal 2 2,000 4,000
Standard Civ/Crim 8 1,050 9,200 Standard Civ/Crim 9 1,600 14,400
to Using 1,150
1,250 Average
Small 4 700 2,800 Small 5 1,250 6,250
Total 14 14,660 17 26,550

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 R-S DLR Proposed Number Sq. Ft. Total Sq. Ft. Hargreaves Number Sq. Ft. Total Sq. Ft.
Proposed
Jury Courtroom 18 1,650 29,700 Jury Courtroom 4 1,650 6,600
Non-Jury Courtroom 9 1,000 9,000
Total 18 29,700 13 15,600

Why This Planning Failure Matters

When building a courthouse, size matters. Size = Cost. The county has said that $586 is the per-
square-foot cost of just the construction component of the proposed courthouse. They have
further said that the fully-burdened cost for the whole project, including all fees for architects,
engineers, construction management etc., is $846 a square foot. If one goes to the scoping
study done by RS/DLR and adds up all of the square footage associated with just the
construction cost of a single courtroom-jury room set and directly related spaces such as sound
deadening vestibules and attorney-client conference rooms, and multiplies that square footage
by $586, it can be seen that the construction cost for each proposed courtroom set and
associated space comes out to $1,418,461. Multiplied by 18, the number of the proposed
courtrooms, the total construction cost just for the proposed courtroom sets comes to a total of
$25,532,298. If the totally burdened project cost of $846 is used in the calculation, then the total
cost for the proposed 18 courtroom sets increases by almost 45%, to about $36,858,000. And,
this does not even include the space necessary for the 18 offices for the judges and staff that
would be associated with each courtroom. Size matters. Size = cost.

As will be seen in the data calculations that follow, only a tiny amount of the work of the court
entails jury trials, so building a jury courtroom for each judge is an egregious waste of space,
and therefore, money.

Some of the Statistical Analysis That Should Have Been DoneBelow is data that has
been gleaned from the annual statistical reports published by the office of the State Court
Administrator regarding the work of the Lane County Circuit Court. This data deals with the
issue around the appropriate number and configuration of courtrooms.

Courtroom Needs

Until 2012, the office of the State Court Administrator (SCA) annually published statistical data
related to the work of each circuit court around the state. With the move to introduce a new,
statewide electronic case management system, no meaningful data was produced from 2012
through 2015. In 2016 all of the previous annual reports were resumed, but with a critical
exception, the data on cases tried each year. The report for 2018 now contains data on cases
tried and is utilized in this paper. It also should be noted that for all years relevant to this
analysis the court had 15 judges.

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Cases Tried Trend Data
Figure 1
Year Total Cases Total Trials Judge 12 Person 6 Person (Misdo)
Terminated (Civ/Fel)

2018 35,259 885 800 58 27

2017 33,520 No Data No Data No Data No Data

2016 32,475 No Data No Data No Data No Data

2011 39,832 614 517 73 24

2010 41,090 588 494 62 32

2009 41,108 813 689 87 37

2008 38,413 1,002 906 61 35

If we look at the available statistics on cases tried, we find that the number of cases each year
that actually get resolved by some sort of trial is very small when compared to the total cases
terminated by the court each year.

In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, we see that only 2.5% of cases (885
cases) terminated were disposed of by some sort of trial. All of the rest of the cases were
resolved by settlements, or various other forms of dismissal before trial. Even in 2008, the year
with the highest number of trials, the disposition by some sort of trial was only 2.6%.

Of the 2.5% of cases that were resolved by some sort of trial in 2018 (885 cases), about 90% of
those cases (800) were tried by a judge without a jury, while about 6.5% (58) were resolved by
a 12-person jury trial and about 3% (27) were resolved by a 6-person jury trial. The total
number of jury trials for the year averages out to just under two cases per week for which some
sort of a jury courtroom was required. Again, by contrast with 2008 data, we see that of the of
the cases that were resolved by some sort of trial that year (1,002), about 90% were tried to a
judge without a jury; about 6% were resolved by a twelve-person jury. The message here is
quite clear; jury trials are a very minor part of the work of the judges of the court.

In Figure 2 below, we can see just how much time judges spent in the courtroom trying cases in
2018. There is no comparable data available for earlier years for comparison. In looking at this
data, Juvenile cases have not been included as they are almost entirely dealt with in the
separate juvenile facility.

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Trial Metrics
Figure 2

Using an average 6-hour trial day (360 minutes) as a standard, we can see that the average
bench trial (judge only) took 179.6 minutes, or just shy of half of a day to try, with only Civil
cases taking an average of more than a day to try (4.6 days). And it should be noted that there
were only 9 such cases (out of 800 total bench trial cases) for the entire year. Every other case
category of bench trial had an average trial time of less than a day, with many categories taking
considerably less than a day.

Turning to the category of jury trials, we see that the average trial time for all jury trials was
(1,097.9 minutes), just a bit over 3 days. As with bench trials, Civil cases required the most trial
time at about 5 trial days and Felonies were the next most time consuming at just over 3 days.
The category of Landlord and Tenant should be taken as an anomaly, with only 1 case, even
though it was of long duration.

It should be note that while Civil jury and bench trials took up by far the longest amount of time
when they were tried, they only amounted to about 3% of the total cases tried. It is also
interesting to note that Civil jury trials, on average, took very close to the same time to try as
the average bench trials in Civil cases. Finally of note is that the three categories of cases most
often tried were Dissolutions, Other Civil Matters and Violations. These three categories, taken
together, accounted for 55% of all cases tried. All are non-jury matters, as are 90% of the cases
tried by the court. There is very little need for courtrooms designed for jury trials.

From the data in Figure 1 and Figure 2, the inescapable conclusion is that trials, and especially
jury trials, account for an extremely small percent of the work of the court. Out of the 35,259
cases actually disposed of by the court in 2018, only 885 cases (3%) were disposed of by a trial

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of some sort, and only 85 cases (0.003%) were disposed of through a jury trial. Further, except
for the small number of Civil and Felony trials, all other categories of cases tried were disposed
of in one day, and most in considerably less than a day. Judges’ time is clearly not being taken
up by long, drawn out trials, but by a continuous flow of relatively short matters that do not
require the services of a jury.

Also as shown by the data above. it is undeniably clear that the vast majority of courtrooms
needed by the court to resolve cases do not need to be configured for the use of juries. In
addition, it is also abundantly clear from the small number of cases actually tried each year that
the notion of needing one courtroom for each judge is completely unsupported by the data.
Circuit court needs very few jury courtrooms, but, instead, needs several, much smaller, non-
jury courtrooms. As pointed out above, what the court and county are asking for in the current
bond issue is 18 courtrooms, each of which will accommodate a 14-person jury, at a cost of
approximately $1,418,000 per courtroom set, or a total of about $25,500,000 just for
courtroom and associated jury rooms etc. Again, the RS/DLR scoping study makes no mention
of any, far less costly, non-jury courtrooms, which the data clearly shows is the most practical
use of space and the most pressing need.

Conclusions

While there is little doubt that a new courthouse is needed in Lane County, unfortunately, the
needed management audit of the case management practices of the court to accompany this
data analysis has not been done by the court. Neither has such an audit been done for the
other agencies that are to occupy the building. Without those audits, a precise determination of
space needs cannot be made. However, given the data furnished by the office of the State
Court Administrator as reviewed in this paper, several general conclusions can be accurately
drawn.
1. The Lane County Circuit Court is a “trial court” in name only. Only 2.5% of the cases
terminated by the court in 2018 (885) were as the result of a trial. Further, only 0.2% (85) were
terminated by a jury trial. And only 0.0016% (58) ended through of a 12-person jury trial. This
data does not represent a statistical aberration. The data set out in Figure 1 shows that is
entirely consistent with historical data over the last 11 years.
2. The Lane County Circuit Court has a significant number of questions that need to be
address in regard to its management of cases and judicial work habits.
3. The planning done to date in preparation for constructing a new courthouse, at least
as to the court, has been seriously flawed to the point of irrelevancy.
4. Before any final planning is done for the space needs of the court—and all of the
other agencies to occupy the proposed new courthouse—a comprehensive management
review of the operations of the court and these other agencies needs to be undertaken. After
such review, the business processes of the court and the other agencies need to be adapted in
accordance with the finding of that review. Only after that can an accurate determination be
made of the actual space needs for the new courthouse.
5. The comprehensive review of court operations, and the other agencies, needs to be
carried out by highly experienced, independent, outside persons or groups. In relation to the
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court, the work would preferably be done by a group such as the Justice Management Institute
rather than the National Center for State Courts, given their prior superficial, flawed work.
6. To meet the needs of the court currently, and into the foreseeable future, something
less than a courtroom for every judge will be adequate.
7. The need for courtrooms configured for 14-peron jury trials is minimal, and the
emphasis needs to be placed on providing an appropriate number of non-jury courtrooms to be
used to conduct the overwhelming majority of the court’s work.
8. Further expenditure of funds regarding space planning for a new courthouse should
cease until the necessary management audits have been undertaken and accurate space
planning studies have been completed based upon the real needs of the courts and the other
agencies to occupy the building.

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Jim Hargreaves is a lifelong resident of Lane County. He served as a judge of the Lane County Circuit Court for 20 years and as
the Presiding Judge of the court for four of those years. After leaving the bench, he spent two decades working as a court and
case management consultant, both on projects in the United States and in thirteen developing countries around world. He
spent the year 2014 in the country of Kosovo, serving as a judge in the major crimes division of both the trial court and the
court of appeals in that country, as part of an assistance program undertaken by the European Union. He is now a legal
observer and commentator, writing about legal issues as well as courts and their management.

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