Speeding Up Pretrials Improves Courts but Cuts Firm Revenue

🔧 What Changed in Senegal’s Courts

A procedural reform required judges to complete pretrials within four months. The reform was rolled out in stages across jurisdictions, creating variation in timing that enables evaluation of its effects.

🔍 How the change was measured

• Matched the reform’s staggered rollout to high-frequency court caseload records.
• Linked those court records to firm tax filings to trace business outcomes at monthly frequency.

📈 Key Findings

• The reform improved judicial efficiency, speeding up pretrial processing, with no detectable decline in case quality.
• Firms experience immediate and persistent costs associated with pretrial proceedings:
• Monthly revenues drop by 8–11% upon entering the pretrial stage.
• Revenues fall on average 3.2–5.0% for every 100 additional days a case remains in pretrial.
• A follow-up survey shows firms are willing to pay higher legal fees to obtain the faster postreform pretrial timelines, indicating that firms value speed despite revenue declines tied to pretrial exposure.

💡 Why It Matters

These results show that relatively simple procedural reforms can speed court processes without sacrificing quality, but they also reveal a hidden cost of litigation: longer pretrials materially reduce firm revenues. The willingness of firms to pay for faster processing suggests net perceived benefits from speed and highlights trade-offs policymakers should weigh when designing judicial reforms.