New Zealand's Family Court judges together spent an average of 340 hours a month dealing with "without notice" applications in the year to 30 September 2016.

Justice Minister Amy Adams has released information on judicial time spent on "without notice" applications in response to a parliamentary question from Labour MP Louisa Wall.

Her response shows that the 14,043 applications over the year meant Family Court Judges spent an average of 17 minutes and 26 seconds on each application.

Ms Adams says judicial time dealing with "without notice" applications has been interpreted as the hours spent on e-Duty events by Judges. The data represents time taken by judges to assess urgent applications immediately after they have been field. Events for which no duration was recorded have been assigned a default duration of 10 minutes.

Judicial time spent dealing with "without notice" applications in Family Court

Ms Wall asked a similar question for the year to 30 April 2016 earlier this year. Because the two differing time periods cover different times of the year, a direct comparison between 2015 and 2016 is only possible for the overlapping months.

In the five months between May and September in 2015 and 2016, the average time taken by Family Court judges on each application increased slightly from 16 minutes 26 seconds in 2015 to 17 minutes and 54 seconds in 2016.

"WIthout Notice" applications, comparison between May-September 2015 and May-September 2016