National Center for State Courts Improves Data Accessibility and Time to Insight with Tableau Server

Over 98% of all court cases in the United States are handled at the state level, equating to more than 65 million cases each year. The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) is a not-for-profit organization that drives innovation and progress in courts and justice systems in the United States and beyond.

Delivering fast, reliable data insights to key stakeholders in a timely manner 

NCSC collects millions of data points from courts around the US every year, dating back as far as 2012. These datasets hold great value to a wide variety of stakeholders, ranging from court professionals, academics and researchers to policymakers. However, prior to Tableau, NCSC struggled to analyze and present key insights within the data to these stakeholders in a timely and efficient manner. 

Much of the analytics work was done manually using rudimentary tools and the organization relied on static PDFs and spreadsheets with embedded graphics to present its findings. These reports were extremely time consuming to create—in many cases lead times were well over a year—meaning the data was out of date before it had even been published. Furthermore, the sheer volume of custom data requests that the data analytics team had to manually fulfill meant they had very little time left over to work on more strategic tasks and responsibilities, such as improving overall data quality.

At a summit in 2020, data specialists from across NCSC came together to discuss possible solutions to the issues faced. Not only was there an urgent need for a centralized analytics platform that would allow employees and stakeholders to directly access live data and self-serve their own analytics needs, but it also needed to be presented in an engaging way, with an intuitive interface that everyone could quickly understand and use. 

“It was clear there was a huge need for a proper data visualization platform within the organization,” says Nicole Waters, Director of Analytics and Forecasting at NCSC. “We had tried a few different solutions previously, but most people struggled with their complexity so they were quickly abandoned. However, when we trialed Tableau, its rich visuals and ease-of-use quickly made it extremely popular throughout the organization.” 

A fully centralized single source for nationwide court data

After a brief trial of Tableau Viewer in late 2020, NCSC opted for a full Tableau Server deployment in 2021 due to its data security, scalability, and collaboration capabilities. With Tableau Server in place, NCSC can store all of its data in a single, centralized location, making critical information much more accessible to everyone. Tableau’s live data connections and automated refreshes mean updates that used to take months, or even years, to complete manually can now be done in near real-time, ensuring the latest information is always available. 

“Having a centralized national resource is invaluable,” adds Sarah Gibson, Data Scientist at NCSC. “For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we created a dashboard that illustrated which courts were open and which were closed at any given time throughout the whole country. This dashboard was embedded in our publicly accessible website and refreshed daily, providing a full nationwide picture at a glance.” 

Static reports replaced with fully interactive live dashboards

NCSC has created dozens of Tableau dashboards to visualize the work of state courts—including how state and local courts are organized and structured, trends in caseloads, variations in state rules and statutes, and serve as a valuable deep dive resource on judicial salaries, civil filing trends, guardianships, and commercial driving.

These dashboards can be directly accessed by key external stakeholders, allowing them to download, view, and analyze the data themselves without having to first submit a custom data request. This has saved NCSC’s in-house analytics team a huge amount of valuable time, as well as money spent on printing costs. 

“Prior to Tableau, we would get multiple custom data requests every week, which took up nearly all of our time,” says Sarah. “Now, we get only a handful of requests a year, which tend to be very sophisticated so [they] need a little internal assistance to fulfill.” 

NCSC has shifted 25% of its resources that were previously dedicated to responding to national data requests towards providing analytical insights for the court community, legislatures, policy makers, and educators. Additionally, more resources can now be dedicated to improving overall data accuracy through initiatives such as the NCSC’s State Court Statistics Project, which uses Tableau to present comparable state court caseload data across over 200 reporting units in all 50 states and 6 US territories at the national level. State courts handle over 98% of all litigation in the US. Providing near real-time access to these datasets is now possible through Tableau’s powerful and interactive dashboards.

The implementation of Tableau has significantly changed the way NCSC is able to serve the court community. Tableau has allowed NCSC to fulfill their mission of supporting the vital work of state courts and sharing a national perspective of the work and diverse landscape of state courts. State courts can tell the story of their work individually, but NCSC is uniquely positioned to paint the broader picture and communicate a national landscape through its work with Tableau dashboards. 

Now, hundreds of data specialists who serve approximately 15,000 courts nationwide are able to access and compare their data in real time. Legislative bodies, executive branch agencies, educators, media, researchers, judges, and court administrators are able to access Tableau dashboards to gain insights into court data and assist in data-informed decision making.

“Tableau has started a data revolution for NCSC and our state court constituents,” concludes Nicole. “Once interest began to snowball, we quickly started to see the quality and reliability of data improve. Embracing tools like Tableau has helped position us as a leader in court data, which is critical to trust in our work and our ongoing success as an organization.” 

Future Forward 

In the future, NCSC plans to implement Tableau Prep into its data preparation process, which will help its data scientists to clean, shape, consolidate, and optimize complex data sets prior to analysis.

The organization is also beginning to explore how it can integrate AI into its data environment through tools like Tableau Agent, which enables users to interact with their data using natural language prompts.

Implementing Tableau Server in 2020 has revolutionized the way NCSC approaches data analytics and how it can be used as a powerful storytelling medium. Over the past five years, the organization has gone from struggling with cumbersome manual processes and spreadsheet-based reporting, to a fully data-informed company where both employees and external stakeholders are empowered to self-serve their own analytics needs. 

Reports that used to take years to compile and publish can now be automatically refreshed in near real-time, while the number of time-consuming custom data requests submitted to the in-house analytics team has dropped significantly. As a result, the team can now focus much more of its time on improving overall data quality, accuracy and consistency, helping to position NCSC as a data leader in its field.