The Scottish Court Service (SCS), the main provider to the Scottish Government of data on the civil justice system, has been working with Justice Analytical Services to improve the accuracy and level of detail of the civil judicial statistics it collects.
As part of this work, SCS has made changes to the configuration and use of electronic systems for case management and data capture throughout the civil courts, which were put in place in the (civil) sheriff courts in April 2008 and the Court of Session in April 2009.
As a result of this work, it is hoped that the data collected by SCS are more accurate and relevant, and there is fuller and more uniform use of the electronic Case Management System (CMS) by the 49 sheriff courts and the Court of Session. For example, information is now collected by all courts on final disposals, sums sued for and multiple craves, and a large amount of data which was previously recorded manually is now collected by CMS.
However, we are still in the process of quality assuring the data and we are not yet in a position to comment on it. A project is underway which is assessing the accuracy of the data collected by the sheriff courts since April 2008 and it will report by the end of summer 2009. At this point a decision will be made as to whether the data for 2008/09 are of acceptable quality to be published.