These guidelines were first devised for a pilot project in four U.S. District Courts to evaluate the use of videotape, and to develop rules and procedures for the future use of videotape in the courts. The graphics in this publication are crude, hand drawn figures.

Superseded by Guidelines for Pre-Recording Testimony on Videotape Prior to Trial, Second Edition (1976).

A "how-to" manual based on the experience of the Research Division staff to help in anticipating the steps involved and to plan for the resources necessary to successfully get information by mail questionnaire.

Despite the various adages concerning statistics and lies, statistics don't lie. Instead, we often mislead ourselves by misinterpreting statistics. Court caseload statistics present numerous opportunities for this sort of self-deception. Obvious ways of looking at caseload data and obvious nostrums about assessing a court's caseload are sometimes just simply wrong. Their flaws are unappreciated not because they are hard to grasp, but because we are conditioned to think about statistics using apples-and-oranges or dicethrowing examples. Because significant time elapses over the life of many court cases, the better statistical analogy is that of human populations. Failure to appreciate how the lifespans of cases affect caseload statistics causes numerous misunderstandings. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate three closely related misunderstandings about caseload statistics, in the hope that a basic understanding of the problem can help prevent mistakes on the part of the various parties charged under the Civil Justice Reform Act with trying to improve the condition of court dockets.

The preliminary findings presented in this report suggest that, in diversity class actions, there is less to class allegations than one would expect. There was relatively little motions activity in the typical case, and the majority of cases not remanded to state court were voluntarily dismissed. Most plaintiffs did not move to certify a class. But all class actions in which a class was certified, whether for litigation or settlement purposes, ended with class settlements.