Trends
What 99,603 Kenyan judgments say in aggregate: how many are decided each year, before which court, and how they end. Every figure is computed from the corpus itself and rebuilt nightly.
Outcome mix
How the corpus ends, court by court. Dismissal is the default outcome of Kenyan litigation, and it is the number an advocate should plan around.
Close to four in five decisions in the corpus end in dismissal or striking out. The proportion is highest at the Supreme Court, where most matters arrive as applications for leave, review or certification rather than as appeals on the merits. “Dismissed” covers appeals and applications refused, petitions struck out for want of jurisdiction, and claims dismissed with costs. The four outcomes below account for 99% of decisions; the balance is consent judgments, withdrawals, and matters where the disposition cannot be read from the text.
Read the bars left to right in the order of the legend. Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole per cent, out of 99,603 decisions.
Decisions by year and court
Recent years in full, everything earlier grouped. The corpus roughly doubled between 2019 and 2025 — the bench grew, and reporting improved.
| Period | Supreme Court | Court of Appeal | High Court | ELRC | Environment & land | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 (to 30 June) | 12 | 118 | 1,204 | 196 | 132 | 1,662 |
| 2025 | 41 | 612 | 6,208 | 1,104 | 742 | 8,707 |
| 2024 | 38 | 588 | 5,914 | 1,052 | 688 | 8,280 |
| 2023 | 34 | 561 | 5,442 | 988 | 645 | 7,670 |
| 2022 | 29 | 502 | 4,906 | 902 | 587 | 6,926 |
| 2021 | 26 | 441 | 3,914 | 806 | 512 | 5,699 |
| 2020 | 31 | 398 | 3,208 | 704 | 448 | 4,789 |
| 2019 | 27 | 372 | 2,986 | 662 | 411 | 4,458 |
| 1899–2018 | 74 | 3,312 | 37,456 | 6,027 | 4,543 | 51,412 |
| All years | 312 | 6,904 | 71,238 | 12,441 | 8,708 | 99,603 |
Court is taken from the judgment header as archived. Earlier decades are grouped because the pre-1990 record is thin: the corpus holds 4,918 decisions delivered before 1990, mostly Court of Appeal and High Court, several of them scanned and OCR-corrected.
Coverage and pace by court
Where the volume sits, and how long each court takes. The ELRC is the fastest court in the corpus; the Court of Appeal the slowest.
| Court | Decisions | Share of corpus | Median time to judgment | Most common outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supreme Court of Kenya | 312 | 0.3% | 7 months | Dismissed 84% |
| Court of Appeal | 6,904 | 6.9% | 31 months | Dismissed 61% |
| High Court | 71,238 | 71.5% | 19 months | Dismissed 68% |
| Employment and Labour Relations Court | 12,441 | 12.5% | 11 months | Dismissed 72% |
| Environment and Land Court | 8,708 | 8.7% | 23 months | Allowed 41% |
Time to judgment runs from filing to delivery where both dates are in the judgment, and from the year of filing where only the year is recorded. Median, not mean, so that a handful of very old matters does not distort the figure. Shares are rounded.
How these figures are computed
These are counts, not opinions. Here is exactly what is counted, and what is left out.
- Which decisions count?
- Every judgment in the corpus — 99,603 of them across the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, Employment and Labour Relations Court and the Environment and Land Court. Variations and rulings count as decisions in their own right, because that is how the courts publish them.
- How is an outcome classified?
- From the disposition paragraph, read in context — the words “appeal dismissed”, “petition allowed”, “struck out”. Where the disposition is ambiguous or the judgment is a ruling on procedure with no final order, the decision is recorded as unclassified and left out of the outcome mix. That is 1.0% of the corpus.
- Why is 2026 partial?
- The figures run to 30 June 2026, the cut-off of the last full ingest. Judgments delivered after that date are in the corpus but not in these tables until the next monthly rebuild.
- Does the scanned record affect the numbers?
- Slightly. 4,120 judgments are scanned PDFs that needed OCR. Where the court or the disposition could not be read with confidence, the decision is flagged in the case archive and excluded from the charts.
- Can I reproduce a figure?
- Yes. Every number on this page is the result of a search you can run yourself: click the figure's label to open the same filter set in case briefs, and the underlying decisions are listed.
- How often is this refreshed?
- Nightly at 02:00 EAT for new judgments, with the medians recomputed monthly. The last rebuild was 30 June 2026, 02:14 EAT.
What the numbers show
Six readings of the corpus: how much is decided, where, how fast, and how it usually ends.
4,458 decisions were delivered in 2019; 8,707 in 2025. Growth is concentrated in the High Court, which now carries 71.5% of the whole corpus.
The Supreme Court dismisses 84% of what it determines, because most matters reach it as applications for leave, review or certification rather than as appeals.
Of 6,904 Court of Appeal decisions, 61% dismiss the appeal outright and only 19% allow it in full. Success is usually partial, or on a subsidiary ground.
Employment and labour matters reach judgment in a median of 11 months, against 19 in the High Court and 31 on appeal. Case management is the difference.
Environment and land decisions rose from 411 in 2019 to 742 in 2025. Land is 8.7% of the corpus and the subject with the longest judgments on average.
The 2025 bench delivered 87 judgments per judge on average, within 4% of 2024. More decisions reflect more judges, not longer hours.