BILL ANALYSIS

Senate Research Center	H.B. 841
88R3805 JTZ-F	By: Ordaz et al. (Middleton)
	Jurisprudence
	5/8/2023
	Engrossed

AUTHOR'S / SPONSOR'S STATEMENT OF INTENT

Currently, the Texas Judicial Council (TJC) requires clerks to report standardized summarized data monthly to the Office of Court Administration. At the district and county level, the data is reported by the county and not by the court.

Measuring the performance of courts results in increased efficiencies, cost reductions, and promotes public transparency. Jurisdictions in Texas that have implemented court performance tools have reported reductions in costly backlogs, cost savings in the form of reductions in the consumption of jail bed days, and reductions in the time for case dispositions.

H.B. 841 specifies that TJC shall gather case-level data that measure how efficiently courts are serving the public. Local jurisdictions that have successfully implemented judicial performance tools measure time to disposition, age of active cases pending, disposition rates, net cost per disposition, jail bed days consumed, and clearance rates, among others.

These performance measures provide the legislature, the judiciary, and county commissioners courts with valuable information to identify inefficiencies. This legislation provides TJC the statutory confirmation to continuously implement this data collection and provide a more substantive report of court data.

H.B. 841 carries a fiscal note, but is funded by both the House and Senate base budgets for the next biennium.

H.B. 841 amends current law relating to certain judicial statistics and related information gathered by the Texas Judicial Council.

RULEMAKING AUTHORITY

Rulemaking authority is expressly granted to the Texas Judicial Council in SECTION 2 of this bill.

SECTION BY SECTION ANALYSIS

SECTION 1. Amends Section 71.035(a), Government Code, as follows:

(a) Requires the Texas Judicial Council (council) to gather judicial statistics and other pertinent information, including case-level information on the amount and character of the business transacted by courts, from the several state judges and other court officials of this state.�

SECTION 2. Requires the council to adopt rules necessary to implement this Act.

SECTION 3. Effective date: September 1, 2023.