The year 2001 saw more change in the Arkansas courts of general jurisdiction then has occurred since the initial creation of the courts in 1874. With the passage of Amendment 80, Arkansas voters reduced the number of states with separate courts of law and equity from four to three and joined the majority of states that have created a unified court of general jurisdiction. As of July 1, 2001, all chancery and probate courts were abolished. These courts were merged into the unified circuit court. All chancery and circuit-chancery judges became circuit judges. The Supreme Court also mandated the establishment of five divisions in each circuit court: civil, criminal, juvenile, probate and domestic relations.

Each judicial circuit was also required to develop and submit to the Supreme Court an administrative plan which described the case management and administrative procedures to be utilized within the circuit. An extensive program of judicial education was also undertaken to train sitting judges in the areas of the law over which they did not previously preside.
In addition to this fundamental structural and procedural change, the number of cases filed in the trial courts also marked a significant increase over the 2000 caseload. The combined filings of criminal, civil, domestic relations, juvenile and probate cases increased from 184,799 in 2000 to 190,132 in 2001. Caseloads were increased in each category of cases with the exception of domestic relations, which decreased from 55,023 cases to 49,075. Most of this decrease was due to a shifting of equity cases from the domestic relations (formerly chancery) division to the civil division. With the addition of five new circuit judges in 2001 the number of filings per judge dropped from 1665 in 2000 to 1653 in 2001.	Trial Courts     184,799     190,132   Juvenile 24,577 Probate 14,647 Chancery 55,023 Civil 23,330 Criminal 67,222 Juvenile 25,488 Probate 15,451 Domestic Relations 49,075 Civil 30,030 Criminal 70,088 Calendar Year     2000          2001     *Juvenile statistics do not include review hearings

Arkansas trial courts terminated 184,627 cases in 2001, an increase of 1% from the 174,816 terminations in 2000. The number of cases pending grew to 181,606 from the 2000 level of 176,139.

The disposition rate compares the number of terminations to the number of filings. The disposition rate for all courts of general jurisdiction was 97.1%, an average of 1606 terminations per judge.