How Productively Does the Ontario Superior Court Use Its Employees?

Productivity, in basic terms, is a measure of outputs to inputs. Though not being measured internally at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, via Freedom of Information Act, it is possible to develop some insight as to the productivity of Court employees (who work for the Ministry of the Attorney General or MAG), and specifically those at the Court Services Division, who are responsible for document filing.

Via Freedom of Information Request, copied below, the number of Full Time Equivalent employees responsible for ‘filing civil documents’ was determined (though such staff have other responsibilities as indicated). Via prior FOIA request, data was obtained as to the number of civil filings received and rejected in the 2022 year, which you can find here.

If we assume that staffing has remained constant, we can then determine how many successful filings are made per employee per year, along with how many rejections are made per Full Time Equivalent staff member, as set forth in the chart below.

As indicated by the response from the Ministry of the Attorney General below, Full Time Equivalent equates to 1,890 hours per year. If we assume an 8 hour workday, that works out to 236 days of work per employee. Then looking at the number of filings per year per Full Time Employee, we can determine the approximate number of files processed by court employees at various locations on a daily basis. Much as Toronto has one of the higher rates of document rejection, so too does it suffer from lower productivity, coming in substantially below Hamilton or Windsor for instance.

Response to my FOIA request is set forth below.