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According to a candidate survey conducted by WTTW in 2024, Mariyana Spyropoulos’ “biggest goal” as Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County is to “create a professional, transparent Clerk’s Office that is accessible to everyone.” In early April, the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County launched a public-facing data portal, taking a meaningful step toward her campaign promise.

The portal, which is easy to read and offers a high-level overview of the caseloads in the Cook County Circuit Court, is a good first step in this direction.  We appreciate the multifaceted challenge of bringing data transparency to the Cook County Circuit Court and are pleased to see the progress Clerk Spyropoulos has made. However, significant gaps in available data remain as  critical information is missing from the data portal. We look forward to seeing continued progress on this issue by Clerk Spyropolous.

The portal allows users to break down the number of cases by month, year, district, and area of law. Users can see case numbers by areas of law, showing a comprehensive list of case types, but as it is now, the portal only shows the number of cases initiated, leaving most statistical information unreported. The data portal does not include data on how the cases in a division were resolved—whether by agreement, dismissal, or at trial. The portal also does not show how long a case remained in the court (the “date to disposition”), so it is impossible to track whether courts are meeting time standards for case closure. Effective use of time standards for courts requires public reporting of when and how courts meet those standards.

In the future, we also hope to see aggregate information about self-representation, the use of interpreter services, or racial data on filers or jurors in this data portal. Including this information poses no risk to sensitive personal or private information collected in aggregate statistics, and it is of significant value to researchers, advocates, and the public.

This data is presently missing from the Cook County dashboard but is not unusual in public data portals for courts in the United States: Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio offer excellent examples of it. The interactive court data dashboard for Michigan, for example, shows not only cases initiated but also outgoing cases, the pending caseload, clearance rates, and case ages; for outgoing cases, the dashboard shows disposition type, including whether it was a jury verdict, bench verdict, default, dismissal, or other disposition. The Minnesota dashboard is slightly less comprehensive, offering county-level court statistics on cases filed, clearance data, and disposition rates. The Ohio dashboard for the courts of common pleas even offers caseload and performance measures for a case type on a county level or by individual judge.

The National Center on State Courts offers comprehensive resources on the value of court data for public use. They offer open court data standards for case-level statistics in criminal cases, family cases, domestic violence cases and guardianship cases. The Court Statistics Project—a joint project of the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA)—collects aggregate case data voluntarily submitted by state courts that offers robust information about how cases move through state courts, what types of cases move through state courts, and how cases in state courts are resolved (e.g., jury trial, bench trial, by agreement). The data includes whether parties are self-represented and whether they require interpreter services. 

Chicago Appleseed is deeply committed to transparency within the Cook County court system. We commend Clerk Spyropoulos’ commitment to transparency and recognize the hurdles the Clerk’s Office faces in developing a robust data portal. We look forward to seeing the Clerk of the Court move toward a more comprehensive public data portal.