A LegalMetric study of more than 200,000 federal civil cases terminated during fiscal year 2004, was reported in The Capital Times on May 24, 2005. The study showed the Western District of Wisconsin tied for first place with the Eastern District of Pennsylvania as the courts with the fastest filing-to-termination average cycle time.
The speedy courts’ average was 5.34 months; the median cycle time for all district courts was more than twice as long. Even so, if district courts on average resolve cases in less than a year, that strikes me as impressively fast.
If you are a law department trying to measure your own cycle time for disposition of lawsuits, you now have a stopwatch, at least for federal district court cases, against which to time yourself.