Jury Duty - Part 4

By Pascal Dennis

The past several blogs we've looked at how to improve the Jury Selection process:

1. Jury Panel Selection --> 2. Jury Selection --> 3. Court Case

What can muck up the process?

Last blog we inferred an important root cause: poor visual management.

Today we'll look to Little's Law for more insight.

Little's Law, as our regular readers will know, is a cornerstone of Production Physics:

Lead Time = Loading/Capacity

To reduce Lead Time we'd need to either:

• Increase capacity, or
• Reduce loading

How might we increase capacity?

Here are some ideas:

• Run court rooms over two shifts - day & night,
• Reduce delay, defect & over-processing waste by level-loading the Jury Selection process
• Enablers: visual management: Target vs. Actual -- Jury panel members, Jury members, cases, courtrooms & other relevant value stream data

How might we reduce case loadingon the court system?

• More cases heard by a judge (sans jury), as in some European jurisdictions

One final suggestion, from my friend & colleague, Al Norval, who has been a juror a number of times:

Move to a professional jury system.

Rationale:

• Quicker & better decisions
• Many jurors lack the experience & knowledge to understand much testimony
• Paid jurors would likely be older, wiser and more motivated to effect justice

• Reduces burden on citizens who are unable to serve because of family or work commitments

Let me conclude as I began in part 1 of this series:

I believe the problems are in the system, and not the people, who I found to be courteous & capable.

How to preserve the integrity of our humane & splendid 19th century system -- while satisfying the needs of a 21st century society?

I believe the principles of the Toyota Production System can help.

Best regards

Pascal