Integrity is a matter of perception as well as objective adherence to substantive and procedural laws. Courts should be viewed as faithfully applying the requirements of substantive and procedural laws. Practicing attorneys and employees of the court are in a position to provide useful information about the integrity of the court’s procedures. This information will be collected in a survey administered to members of the bar and court employees. The attorneys and court employees will be asked whether they are aware of specific requirements of law not observed in the court. If they are, they will be asked to cite underlying statutes or procedures as closely as they can.

Planning/Preparation. Different techniques will be used to select each set of respondents. For the purpose of this measure, "court employee" designates staff members of the clerk of court as well as persons employed by the judges. A court employee payroll list is requested from the court administrator and court clerk. The list should be annotated, using the most expedient means possible, with each employee’s position and duties. In some cases, the court’s personnel records may be organized in such a way that no extra effort will be required for annotation. If this is not the case, a system of codes will be provided to the court to make annotation as simple as possible. One group of code values will indicate the kinds of cases with which the employee is familiar; another will indicate the kinds of duties the employee performs. For example, classification of duties will include activities such as courtroom services, document processing at the public counter, recording documents in docket records, managing records, working with judgments and judgment dockets, scheduling matters for calendars of court sessions, supervising probation, preparing pretrial release evaluations and reports, conducting presentence investigations, and handling cashier duties, cash bookkeeping or accounting, jury management, and so forth.

The court employee list will be used to identify employee respondents for the survey. Part-time employees and maintenance staff should be excluded from the sample group. Of those remaining, all employees should receive the survey. (If some groups of employees performing similar duties are very large, a sample of these groups could be drawn rather than sending the questionnaire to all of the employees in each group.)

For each division of the court included in the evaluation (i.e., general civil, criminal, juvenile, domestic, and so forth), docket entries for cases filed during the previous year is sampled, and a list of attorney names for all of the sampled cases is compiled. Attorneys who practice often in the court are likely to appear on the list more than once, and this frequency should be noted. As a result, if the court chooses, it can sample according to the attorneys’ degrees of practice.

Data Collection. For examples of possible questions to be used in data collection, refer to Form 3.1.2, Illustrative Questions for Measuring Court Employees’ and Attorneys’ Assessments of Fidelity to the Law. The questionnaires for court employees will be distributed via interoffice mail. The questionnaires for attorneys should be mailed with a cover letter signed by the president of the local bar association and the presiding judge of the local court.

Questionnaires will be returned in sealed envelopes coded to match the "master" list of individuals to whom questionnaires were given. Because the respondents are employees of the court and attorneys who regularly practice before the court, confidentiality is important, especially in smaller jurisdictions where it may be relatively easy to determine the identity of respondents to questionnaires. Care must be taken to avoid identifying respondents by their handwriting or how they return the questionnaires.

Individuals who return a questionnaire should be noted on the master list. When 10 days have elapsed from the date respondents received the questionnaire, a reminder should be sent to those individuals who have not yet returned a questionnaire. A second notice should be sent after 10 days have elapsed. At any time after 30 days, the data may be tabulated.