The 100-Day goal
The court’s domestic team set one goal: finalise 80% of their domestic matters inside 100 days. Not more hearings scheduled, not more files opened. Matters closed, and survivors given an outcome.
The results
The team finalised 910 cases in 100 days, passing the goal they set.
They did it while 877 new matters were registered against them, an average of 58 new cases every week. Finalisations outpaced new registrations across the full period. The backlog did not simply move sideways while the team worked on something else. It shrank while the inflow continued.
Who did the work
This was the court’s own domestic section, the people who handle these files daily, working alongside the presiding magistrate rather than reporting up to a project office. No new posts were created and no new budget was allocated.
How they did it
The biggest single blockage was the absent applicant. A matter where the applicant does not appear stalls, then stalls again, then ages out. The team stopped treating an absence as the end of the road. They allocated staff time to trace the applicant, open a line of communication, establish where she was and why she had not come, and put that information in front of the magistrate so the matter could proceed on the facts instead of waiting.
Virtual hearings were tested and did not carry the weight the team hoped for. Clients in the rural parts of the district could not reliably get online or afford the data. The team learned early that the technology fix was not going to be the answer here, and put their energy into the tracing work instead.
What continues
The team has committed to running a second 100-Day Challenge and is now setting a sustainability target to hold the finalisation rate rather than let it fall back once the sprint ends. The tracing practice for absent applicants stays in place, because it was built by the clerks and officers who use it, not handed to them.
