The Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office (LACPD) is the largest public defense agency in the United States, serving nearly 10 million residents across a vast and diverse region and employing more than 700 attorneys. For an office of LACPD’s scale and complexity, understanding workload demands requires more than simply tracking case counts, which fails to capture how public defense work has evolved given new justice reform legislation in California, expanded diversion programs, and the proliferation of digital evidence.
To better understand attorneys’ time commitments per case type, LACPD leadership sought an independent, data-driven study with two purposes: (1) rigorously evaluate the office’s Case Complexity System (CCS), which algorithmically scores the complexity of individual cases, and (2) assess the office’s broader organizational capacity to effectively represent its clients amid growing case complexity and resource constraints.
To validate whether CCS scores accurately reflect case complexity and workload demands, the authors of this report relied on three independent measures of case complexity and workload demand: a time study that involved attorneys’ self-reported hours during an eight-week period, a Delphi panel composed of experienced LACPD attorneys, and CCS’s algorithmically generated scores.
The authors integrated these quantitative measures with qualitative data from attorney interviews, five years of case management data, and a detailed examination of case assignment practices and support staff use. Through their analyses, the authors synthesize findings and recommend ways that LACPD can continue to improve workload assignments and better serve the people of Los Angeles County.
