Data Questions
Who is eligible?
Who requests assistance?
Who do we help?
How do we help?
What resources are required?
Snapshot
How many hours does your organization spend on different types of work (case, other services, supporting)?
How many hours do your various substantive areas spend on different types of work?
How many hours does your organization spend on different types of legal problems?
How many case hours are worked by staff versus pro bono volunteers?
How many hours are spent using different funding codes?
How many hours are spent achieving various outcomes?
Snapshot
Snapshot analyses measure counts or percentages for a given period, usually the most recently completed year. If any counts or percentages are unexpected, comparison, trend or spatial analyses may be necessary to better understand the reasons for the unexpected results.
Example Data Question
How many hours did we spend last year on cases from different legal problem code categories? What is the average hours per case that we spent on cases from different legal problem code categories?
Multiple Analyses Are Possible
- Do some types of legal issues require more resources/work time than others?
- Are the average hours spent on different types of legal problem categories what we would expect? Are some taking longer than expected? Are some requiring fewer hours than expected? If any of these averages are different than expected, do we know why?
Data Sources
Closed Case data from your case management system, including:
- Fields that show hours worked on cases
- Problem codes
- Open date and close date
- Other case information that you might be able to use in other analyses demographics, etc.
- Exclude cases that were identified as errors or duplicates, but make sure to keep cases that ended up not being served
Example Analyses Steps
- Export the total cases closed (including served or not served) from your CMS to a spreadsheet for the most recently completed year.
- Sort the cases by the categories of legal problems meaningful to your organization.
- Subtotal the hours worked for cases within each of the legal problem code categories and divide the total hours by the total number of cases to get average hours per case for each category.
- Create a graph within Crystal Reports, Excel, or whichever analysis software you prefer (Excel Column Chart shown in this example) that shows the total hours and the average hours per case for each category. Because the totals and the averages will be very different numbers, use a chart with a secondary axis for either the totals or the averages.
- For the numbers shown with bars, give each legal problem code category a different color to make the graph easy to understand.
- For the numbers, show with a line and markers, keep the markers and remove the line so that it doesn’t look like a trend chart.
