In this report, the authors rigorously evaluate the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office’s Case Complexity System, which scores the complexity of individual cases, and assess the office’s broader organizational capacity to effectively represent its clients amid growing case complexity and resource constraints.

Los Angeles County Public Defender Attorney Workload Study

Final Report

Maya Buenaventura, Amy Mahler, James M. Anderson, Nicholas M. Pace

ResearchPublished Sep 10, 2026

The Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office (LACPD) is the largest public defense agency in the United States, serving nearly 10 million residents across a vast and diverse region and employing more than 700 attorneys. For an office of LACPD’s scale and complexity, understanding workload demands requires more than simply tracking case counts, which fails to capture how public defense work has evolved given new justice reform legislation in California, expanded diversion programs, and the proliferation of digital evidence.

To better understand attorneys’ time commitments per case type, LACPD leadership sought an independent, data-driven study with two purposes: (1) rigorously evaluate the office’s Case Complexity System (CCS), which algorithmically scores the complexity of individual cases, and (2) assess the office’s broader organizational capacity to effectively represent its clients amid growing case complexity and resource constraints.

To validate whether CCS scores accurately reflect case complexity and workload demands, the authors of this report relied on three independent measures of case complexity and workload demand: a time study that involved attorneys’ self-reported hours during an eight-week period, a Delphi panel composed of experienced LACPD attorneys, and CCS’s algorithmically generated scores.

The authors integrated these quantitative measures with qualitative data from attorney interviews, five years of case management data, and a detailed examination of case assignment practices and support staff use. Through their analyses, the authors synthesize findings and recommend ways that LACPD can continue to improve workload assignments and better serve the people of Los Angeles County.

Key Takeaways

CCS tracks relative case complexity in the aggregate

  • CCS assigns higher scores to cases that both the time study and the Delphi panel estimated as the most demanding.

There is room to improve alignment in some areas

  • Most felony cases cluster at the lower end of the CCS scale, and mid-level felony categories with varying workload demands (as indicated by Delphi estimates) often receive similar scores, limiting differentiation.

CCS is early in its implementation, and some refinements would broaden its usefulness

  • CCS is promising in its design, and addressing data quality and implementation issues would strengthen the scores it produces.
  • CCS scores are not yet calibrated to be cardinally proportional—a case with a score of 4 does not necessarily reflect twice the amount of attorney hours as a case with a score of 2—so LACPD cannot yet use aggregate scores to determine how many attorney hours a given caseload requires.

Support-staff wait times pull attorneys away from legal work

  • According to attorneys the authors interviewed, long wait times for support from social workers and paralegals mean that attorneys often take on administrative and case-support tasks.

Recommendations

  • LACPD could improve CCS data quality by extracting key information from attorneys’ case notes and encouraging consistent entry in the structured Client Case Management System fields that drive scoring.
  • LACPD should ensure that CCS scores are cardinally proportional using expert elicitation and/or officewide timekeeping and by establishing an annual validation cycle to recalibrate factor weights over time.
  • LACPD should expand support staff roles where possible and formalize them in diversion support and digital-evidence management, which would allow attorneys to spend more time on legal work.

Topics

Document Details

  • Copyright: Los Angeles County Public Defender
  • Publisher: RAND Corporation
  • Availability: Web-Only
  • Year: 2026
  • Pages: 119
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.7249/RRA5011-1
  • Document Number: RR-A5011-1

Citation

Chicago Manual of Style

Buenaventura, Maya, Amy Mahler, James M. Anderson, and Nicholas M. Pace, Los Angeles County Public Defender Attorney Workload Study: Final Report. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA5011-1.html.
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Research conducted by

This research was sponsored by LACPD and conducted by the Infrastructure and Justice Program of RAND Education, Employment, and Infrastructure.

This publication is part of the RAND research report series. Research reports present research findings and objective analysis that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND research reports undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity.

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