Court administrators trained through NACM’s curriculum know the CourTools framework well. Developed by the National Center for State Courts, it gives courts a standardized set of 10 performance measures: access and fairness, clearance rate, time to disposition, age of active pending caseload, trial date certainty, case file integrity, legal financial obligations, juror management, employee satisfaction, and cost per case.
These are the right things to measure. They cover the full range of what a well-run court looks like from the outside and the inside. When a court performs well across all 10 areas, administrators can demonstrate this to judges, policymakers, and the public with data rather than impressions.
But three of those 10 measures move in predictable ways when one upstream variable shifts, and CourTools doesn’t track that variable.
The three vulnerable measures
Clearance rate (Measure 2), time to disposition (Measure 3), and trial date certainty (Measure 5) are the most directly affected by what happens before defendants walk through the courthouse door. When a defendant misses a court date, the case doesn’t resolve. The clearance rate declines. The pending caseload ages. The calendar fills with reset hearings, reducing certainty for every other case. These are compounding effects from a single upstream event.
A court with a rising failure-to-appear rate will see all three measures deteriorate in sequence. Administrators watching these numbers know the court is falling behind. What CourTools doesn’t give them is a diagnostic path back to why.
What the research established
The landmark study on this came from ideas42 and the University of Chicago Crime Lab and was published in Science in 2020. An analysis of more than 800,000 New York City summonses found that behavioral text reminders reduced failure-to-appear rates by 21 to 26 percent. Combined with a redesigned summons form, the reduction reached 36 percent, preventing an estimated 30,000 arrest warrants over three years at a program cost under $7,500 annually.
ideas42’s May 2025 implementation guide, produced with the Pew Charitable Trusts, synthesized this and subsequent research into a range of 20 to 40 percent reductions in FTA achievable through well-designed reminder programs. Their (Un)warranted initiative reports that it has prevented more than 125,000 missed court dates and generated $357 million in savings across partner jurisdictions.
The mechanism is communication. Most defendants don’t miss court because they’re evading the system. They miss court because they didn’t receive a reliable reminder, couldn’t confirm the date, or didn’t have a clear way to ask questions before the hearing. That’s a solvable problem, and it’s the problem that determines whether Measures 2, 3, and 5 trend up or down.
What CourTools doesn’t track
None of the 10 CourTools measures captures failure-to-appear rate as a primary metric. None tracks message delivery rate, phone number completeness at booking, appearance confirmation, or any other communication variable that predicts FTA. A court that diligently measures its CourTools metrics can watch Measure 2 decline over two quarters and have no native diagnostic tool in the framework to explain it.
That’s not a criticism of CourTools. It was designed to measure court performance, not communication infrastructure. But it means administrators using CourTools alone are always looking backward, at results rather than causes.
What fills the gap
eCourtDate’s analytics platform tracks the leading indicators that predict CourTools outcomes: failure-to-appear rates, message delivery statistics, case backlogs, and communication metrics by case type, location, and judge. The data dashboards add cross-jurisdiction benchmarking, trend forecasting, Tableau and Power BI integration, and compatibility with Justice Counts Metrics from the Council of State Governments Justice Center.
Together, these give administrators what CourTools doesn’t: an upstream view. If the clearance rate starts to decline, the analytics layer can show whether message delivery rates have dropped, whether phone number completeness at booking has fallen, or whether FTA is concentrated in a specific case type or courtroom. That diagnostic path exists inside the platform.
What it looks like in practice
Through the first 14 months of the Texas OCA reminder program, 29 courts achieved an 87.9 percent appearance rate against a national baseline of approximately 73 percent, preventing 4,595 nonappearances and generating an estimated $6.9 million in cost savings. That was the baseline. The program has kept growing.
As of May 2026, 37 agencies across Texas are active on the platform. In the three months from March through May alone, the program logged 89,313 verified court events. May’s run rate of 38,000 events per month is still accelerating, driven by recently activated jurisdictions scaling up quickly. Applying the avoidance rate established through the first 14 months of the program, the cumulative total since launch is estimated at approximately 11,000 prevented nonappearances and $16 million in avoided system costs, at zero cost to Texas counties.
Each of those prevented nonappearances shows up in exactly the three CourTools measures most sensitive to FTA. Clearance rate holds when cases aren’t reset for missed appearances. Time to disposition stays within standards when the calendar isn’t compressed by continuances. Trial date certainty improves when the first-scheduled hearing is the one that actually happens.
The analytics layer that tracks FTA rate and communication performance is what makes that movement visible before it appears in CourTools. Administrators can see the leading indicator trending in the right direction, not just the outcome it produces.
The full picture
CourTools is built for accountability: demonstrating to judges, policymakers, and the public that resources are being used well and that cases are moving through the system. That function matters, and the framework serves it well.
The analytics layer serves a different but complementary function: operational diagnosis. When something changes in CourTools, administrators need a way to trace it back to its source. The failure-to-appear rate, driven by communication effectiveness, is the most direct link between what courts can control and what CourTools measures.
A live demo of eCourtDate’s data dashboard is available at demo.courtdashboards.com.
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Further Reading
CourTools: Trial Court Performance Measures — National Center for State Courts
Behavioral Nudges Reduce Failure to Appear for Court — Alissa Fishbane, Aurelie Ouss, and Anuj K. Shah, Science, 2020
Creating an Effective Court Reminder Program — ideas42 and Pew Charitable Trusts, 2025
The (Un)warranted Initiative — ideas42
About Greg Shugart
Director of Government Relations
Greg Shugart brings over 30 years of public sector experience to the eCourtDate team, with a background in court administration, criminal justice reform, and government operations. He previously served as Criminal Courts Administrator for Tarrant County, Texas, where he led statewide-recognized initiatives in pretrial modernization, court communications, and system efficiency. Greg now contributes to eCourtDate’s strategy and partnerships, helping agencies implement technology that improves access, compliance, and trust in the justice system.