Let the record show: a structured approach to process analytics in judicial contexts

Process mining and other forms of event data analytics have shown to be valuable tools for supporting the management and execution of business processes. For this, process recordings in the form of event logs are required. Digitalization efforts have led to an increased availability of event data for many previously paper-based processes. This has also inspired the extension of process analytics beyond classical business processes. One example of this is judicial processes, which are not necessarily bound by typical business constraints, but nonetheless face issues related to, e.g., increasing efficiency or improving resource allocation. Thus, this paper proposes a structured approach that combines domain expert knowledge with data-driven analysis to explore the usefulness of process analytics for judicial processes. Using an exemplary use case from a German social court, we show how event logs can be extracted from digitalized court files and, using our approach, identify bottlenecks. Using this approach, we are able to derive statistically grounded and expert validated bottlenecks as well as four actionable insights for reducing case durations. Thereby, we show that process analytics is a promising tool for facilitating the optimization of judicial processes.