The 100-Day goal
Clear the domestic violence and maintenance backlogs entirely, improve turnaround times, cut the sexual offence backlog by 70% and the divorce backlog by 60%.
The results
Divorce backlog: 320 cases down to 74, a 76% reduction against a 60% target.
Sexual offence backlog: 29 cases down to 9, a 69% reduction, landing just short of the 70% they set.
Domestic violence turnaround: 30 days down to 21.
Maintenance turnaround: 30 days down to 14, half the time it took before.
The maintenance figure is the one that changes a household. Two weeks instead of a month is the difference between a woman staying and a woman being able to leave.
Who did the work
The court’s own staff, across the domestic violence, maintenance, sexual offences and divorce streams, working as one team rather than four separate rolls.
How they did it
The team’s read was that the backlog was not a single problem with a single fix. It sat across four case types, each with its own bottleneck, and the only way through was to hold every stakeholder in the process to the same 100-day clock at the same time. That commitment across the full chain is what let them push volume through instead of clearing one category while the others aged.
Alongside the court work, they ran two outreach programmes at two local schools. The court did not wait for cases to arrive. It went to the point where young people are forming their understanding of what is reportable and what is not.
What continues
Lephalale has committed to a second 100-Day Challenge. The turnaround times set during the sprint are now the court’s working standard rather than a target, and the outreach relationship with the two schools gives the court a route into the community it did not have before day one.
