Personnel scheduling problem in law systems: The example of expropriation cases

Public institutions make expropriation to provide service access to individuals in the fulfillment of public services. Due to the wide range of service areas and needs, an average of 50000 cases is filed annually in our country regarding expropriation. The appointment of lawyers assigned to represent public institutions in lawsuits without calculating the files' workload causes an unbalanced workload distribution among lawyers. Although the activities that constitute the workload of lawyers seem to be participating in hearings and discoveries, preparation of the case file, preparation for hearings and discovery findings to courthouses on the relevant days, preparation of petitions during the trial examination of the files are also among the workloads. These workloads are not taken into account in file assignments and cause an unbalanced distribution of lawyers' workloads. In this study, the problem of assigning the case files related to expropriation procedures in a public institution to lawyers is addressed. In the institution, 724 case files of three different types are opened in 15 different regions within one month, and six lawyers work in the institution. A goal programming model has been proposed to balance lawyers' workloads by calculating the cases' workloads. Preparation, trial, discovery, file review, and travel times were taken into account to estimate the files' workload. The proposed model can also be used in other public institutions and for assigning different case files.