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GREENSBORO — Despite continually increasing caseloads, judges in Guilford County’s courts have been able to eat away at a backlog, a new report shows.

The annual report, released last week, is compiled by Trial Court Administrator Jon Bellows.

The state’s financial woes led to hiring freezes in 2010 that reduced staff, but the number of cases handled by the courts continued to grow.

“To continue to 'do more with less’ risks compromising the quality of and access to justice,” he wrote.

In 2010, 2,624 more cases were filed than in 2009, about a 1 percent increase. Judges closed out 15 percent more cases in 2010 than in 2009, he wrote.

Bellows credits the N.C. Arrest Warrant Repository with likely increasing the number of closed cases. The new system allows courts to find and dispose of old criminal cases and significantly reduce the case backlog. The spike in disposal of cases will continue into this year before tapering off, Bellows wrote.

Guilford County accounts for 6.21 percent of all cases filed statewide, up slightly from 6.12 percent in 2009 , according to the report.

In 2010 , more than 12,000 more cases were filed in Guilford than in 2008 . During that same time, the total number of cases filed statewide has consistently fallen, he wrote.

Last year, the county reduced the number of people called for jury duty, which saves money for costs related to producing, mailing and processing a summons as well as juror compensation.

Computerizing the jury system has created more accurate lists with up-to-date addresses, which reduces the number of people called, Bellows said.

There were 65,475 people called in 2005 and 48,505 in 2010 , he said. If the county had called that extra nearly 17,000 people each year, it would have cost the state $200,000 annually, assuming that each person served at least one day of jury duty. The state pays $12 per day to jurors.

“If we had not continually been monitoring, we’d still be summoning more than 60,000,” he said.

The report lauds the effectiveness of programs such as the drug treatment court, which lost its administrator in the budget cuts that become effective July 1. It’s unclear how that will affect the specialty courts at this point, Bellows said.

Contact Jennifer Fernandez at 373-7064 or jennifer.fernandez@news-record.com