The Staff of the Supreme Court: annual overview of the team's performance

Viktor Kapustynskyi,

Chief of Staff of the Supreme Court

Rasim Babanly,

First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Supreme Court

A year has passed since the change of leadership of the Supreme Court and, accordingly, the leadership of its Staff. This period allows us to summarise certain results. 

The main advantage that made it possible to quickly get into the context and implement changes ‘without a rocky start’ is our considerable experience of cooperation, as we have been working together in the Staff of the High Specialised Court of Ukraine for Civil and Criminal Cases since 2012, and in 2016-2017 we had experience of cooperation in similar positions to our current ones: Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff of this Court. In 2017, we joined forces to contribute to the establishment of the Supreme Court. 

Given this experience of cooperation, it was quite easy to divide responsibilities. The Chief of Staff of the Supreme Court personally directs the activities of the Staff in the areas of methodological, legal, documentary, information technology, financial, personnel, material and technical, social and welfare support, etc.; the First Deputy Chief of Staff is responsible for analytical, communication, international activities, coordinates consideration of citizens' appeals and anti-corruption activities, etc.

Today we will focus on the main changes for the better that have been implemented during the period under review.

The first achievement we would like to share with you is the transition to a qualitatively new level of organisation in the creation and management of personnel documents.

Why is it important? As a reminder, the total number of judges and staff of the Court's Staff is 1,431. The structure of the Court consists of four courts of cassation and the Grand Chamber. Accordingly, the structure of the Staff includes four secretariats to support the activities of the cassation courts, as well as a number of general structural units. All these units are located at four different addresses.

These facts were not taken into account by the previous management, and therefore only the Chief of Staff was the signatory of all personnel documents (orders on appointment, transfer, dismissal, leave, etc.). This led to significant organisational difficulties and unjustified expenditure of human, time and technical resources. The logistics of these documents were extremely complicated: first, they had to be collected from all the cassation courts, then brought to the premises on P. Orlyka Street ; considerable time had to be spent on signing them and returning them to the cassation courts. On average, it took 3-4 working days to prepare an order from the moment it was drafted until the staff of the relevant court received the signed document.

Therefore, the first decision of our team was to delegate the signing of these documents to the heads of the secretariats of the cassation courts and reduce the number of mandatory documents that accompany personnel facts in court. This was implemented in 2023. And today - in 2024 - all HR documents (applications of employees on HR issues, relevant orders, instructions) are generated exclusively in electronic form!

We are proud of this achievement, as well as the fact that we have set a clear course towards going paperless. This is the next thing we would like to talk about.

In 2023, 99% of the document flow in the Supreme Court (we are talking about non-procedural documents) was in paper form. Even those documents that were originally created electronically were printed out. Previously, each document was accompanied by a paper resolution, which, after being signed by the head, was attached to 99% of the documents.

Today, 90% of such documents are circulated electronically. And we continue to work on minimising outdated practices.

Going paperless has helped us to speed up the logistics of documents and to reduce office expenses, which means unnecessary budget costs. In addition, we have been able to support the idea of conserving environmental resources. We are trying to use the potential of the paperless direction for further optimisation in other areas of Staff's activities, as the possibilities of this progressive document management mode have not yet been exhausted.

Next, let's talk about the most painful issue - the budget. In 2023, the Court had to reduce its staff by 330 positions, or almost 20%. The key problem was that a significant burden of financing salaries was placed on court fees from a special fund, i.e. unstable and unprotected court fee revenues. This dependence on court fees was not only contrary to the basic principles of the civil service, but also to the purpose of its use.

The reason was that from year to year, a significant part of the salaries of the Staff was formed from a special fund of the budget (i.e., was not guaranteed). The decrease in court fee revenues, which was the result of legislative changes, full-scale war and other objective factors, threatened the payment of salaries to the employees of the Staff.

However, the solution to this problem by downsizing the Staff was a response to the consequence, not to the cause of the problem. 

The new management team responded to the cause. Thanks to well-founded initiatives of the management, constructive dialogues with the Ministry of Finance and support of the Parliament, we managed to solve this problem. The salaries of the Staff's employees were removed from the special fund and included in the general fund, which means that now the entire salary fund (both judicial remuneration and salaries of the Staff's employees) is provided exclusively from the general fund, which is protected.

As a result of these changes, we have another positive thing - the ability to accumulate court fee income and use it for its intended purpose: internet, office supplies, postage and other expenses associated with running a fairly large organisation. And if we started 2023 with almost zero in our accounts, today's savings allow us to cover a significant part of our expenses and think confidently about development.

ІТ. This year alone, we have managed to develop three IT products in-house, thanks to personnel changes in the management of the IT department:

1) an artificial intelligence translator from English into Ukrainian;

2) a programme for case management of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court;

3) a crucial product for ensuring the unity of case law - Supreme Lab, to which we will provide open access within a few months.

For the first time, we have found a technical solution to bring together in a single resource information on pending and past cases of the Chambers, the Joint Chambers and the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court.

Any lawyer who analyses judicial practice knows how difficult it is today to find and track relevant information. Supreme Lab makes it easy. The software has been developed and maintained by IT specialists, while the content is provided by the Analytical and Legal Department. The software has been tested in the Supreme Court for several months now and has received very positive feedback on its convenience and usefulness. Just wait and you will soon be one of its users.

Communication. At the end of 2023, we launched a brand new resource - Supreme Observer. This is a portal of modern law, where we want to collect all the copyright content created by judges and employees of the Supreme Court. There is a lot of such high-quality content, and we believe it should be concentrated on one resource. In addition, we record interviews with Supreme Court judges and create analytical video content together with the JustGroup project. We also publish information about cases, reviews, digests and presentations by SC judges on this website, which is also an extremely useful source of information for lawyers.

Youth and students. In terms of external communication, the Supreme Court presented the concept of cooperation with law schools and signed memoranda of cooperation with leading legal institutions. This concept encompasses a range of activities, including internships for students at the Supreme Court, workshops led by Supreme Court judges, moot courts held at the Supreme Court, and the development of the official Instagram page of the Supreme Court with a focus on young people. The implementation of this idea seems to be successful and will be continued in the future. Investing in young people is justified because it creates a bridge between the place where judicial practice develops and future lawyers. This is the key to ensuring that the younger generation acquires the most up-to-date knowledge and understands the motives and thought processes of Supreme Court judges. Human capital is our country's most valuable resource and we believe that the development of young people by the highest judicial body is a very important area for the Supreme Court.

Reviews of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. In addition to the usual reviews of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, we have added reviews of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. We do not need to remind you of the importance of European integration. Today we are at the stage of screening legislation. As part of this screening, the European Commission is interested in whether the legislation and court practice in Ukraine are in line with the case law of the EU Court of Justice. The Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court has already applied the case law of the EU Court of Justice in two judgments. Therefore, we believe that it is important to know and understand this practice, and therefore to have access to it in Ukrainian.

Employees of the Staff. At the beginning of the article, it was mentioned that the year 2023 had to start with a 20% reduction in the number of employees of the Staff, i.e. 330 positions. It was a painful and forced step. However, at the end of the same year, due to the resignation of a number of judges, the positions of patronage service employees of these judges (approximately 30 FTEs) became available in the Staff. The management decided to distribute these vacant positions without increasing the total number of employees of the Staff in order to overcome the problems caused by the staff reduction and partially restore the activities of the liquidated structural units.

The Plenum of the Supreme Court supported this idea, and the situation was improved by strengthening the institutional capacity of the Staff.

There was criticism that it was a 'rollback' and so on. We fundamentally disagree with that assessment. There is no 'rollback', it is a rational solution to critical problems that arose as a result of the initial reduction, which was illogical and subjective in some respects. Today, the workforce is fairly balanced and generally allows us to carry out the tasks that have been set for the Staff. However, in some areas there are still too few posts. Of course, we do not intend to raise the issue of increasing the number of employees in the context of the war. We also have to admit that the level of qualification of some colleagues needs to be improved, and we see this not only through training and shifting priorities to qualitative indicators, but also through new selections. The continuation of systematic personnel work is on the agenda.

Cooperation with the ECHR. Knowledge Sharing Platform. At the beginning of the year, the President of the Supreme Court and the ECHR agreed that, with the support of the ECHR, we would translate the platform into Ukrainian. The ECHR created this platform several years ago as a unique analytical resource and it is publicly available. However, all the material published on it is in English. The idea of the ECHR is that the dissemination of knowledge in Ukraine about Council of Europe standards and ECHR case law will contribute to the development of the Ukrainian legal system, and for this purpose it is necessary to translate this resource into Ukrainian. In order to achieve this goal, we cooperate with representatives of the ECHR Registry and the Council of Europe. Taking into account the large volume of material, the Staff has identified two positions with the appropriate functionality. This is an unprecedented and important direction.

Remuneration. As a result of the successful budget process mentioned above and legislative changes, the salary costs of the Staff's employees have increased significantly during our mandate. This is partly due to the classification of officials by grade.

Trust Box. In order to ensure continuous internal communication between the staff and the Management of the Staff, a dialogue has been introduced through a Trust Box. This allows any member of staff to make an anonymous complaint which is immediately examined by the Chief of Staff. The purpose of introducing such a mechanism was, and still is, to create an atmosphere of openness and trust between employees and the Chief of Staff in order to diagnose problems and find ways to solve them. The Trust Box has proved to be an important tool for resolving issues that are not obvious to management but which are stumbling blocks for employees.

This article highlights some of the innovations in the Supreme Court's work. We have tried to draw attention to certain points of growth - what we have managed to change for the better. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the Supreme Court Staff team. After all, it is impossible to implement change without inspired staff.

As well as implementing the changes, the Staff have carried out a huge amount of ongoing work. For example, we estimate that the Supreme Court receives a MILLION of 'documents' in the broad sense of the word (procedural and non-procedural appeals) during the course of a year. This volume is processed by the Supreme Court team, and this is only part of the total workload.

What is also important are the results of the daily routine work. Sometimes it is not visible, but it is significant. In the course of the year, such long-delayed cases were completed as: the relaunch of information and reference resources and services for citizens; the solution of the heating problem for the Administrative Cassation Court; the adoption of the necessary measures to start hearing cases in the courtrooms marked "secret" or "for official use"; the reorganisation of the activities of the staff working groups for the rapid, coordinated and, above all, team-based resolution of current and strategic issues, etc.

Therefore, we would like to express our gratitude for the inspired, professional and selfless work of all employees of the Staff of the Supreme Court - heads of secretariats, heads of structural units, specialists of various levels and employees of judges' offices.

In short, the aim of our activities is to improve the organisational support of the Supreme Court as much as possible. And we have found and implemented the means for such improvement.

It is clear that to the naked eye, and especially to those outside the Supreme Court, such changes are not known, let alone obvious. Consequently, in the absence of sufficient information, the position prevails: 'if I don't see it, it doesn't exist'.

Such a view obviously cannot be considered objective and is at least incomplete. This state of affairs is partly due to the fact that we have focused on the 'reforms' discussed above and have somewhat lost sight of public communication.

With this article, therefore, we seek to fill this communication gap.

To be continued.