The New York State Unified Court System released its 2017 annual report Thursday, highlighting efforts to reduce felony and misdemeanor backlogs and the increasing use of technology to automate systems.

Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence Marks said 2017 advanced Chief Judge Janet DiFiore's Excellence Initiative, which aims to reduce chronic backlogs through the state's court system.

“We are under a mandate from the chief judge to 'achieve and maintain excellence throughout the court system.' With that mandate, if we simply did as well in 2017 as we had in 2016, we would have failed,” Marks said in the report. “So, we had to do better, and with the hard work and diligence of our judges and staff, we moved forward in the pursuit of excellence.”

Since the Excellence Initiative began in 2016, there has been a 72 percent reduction in the oldest pending misdemeanor cases in New York County, a 68 percent reduction in Bronx County and a 60 percent reduction across the five boroughs, according to the report.

Outside of the New York City area, there has been a 31 percent reduction in the number of misdemeanors over standards and goals in city and district courts across the state. As for felonies, the oldest pending felony cases are down 91 percent in the Ninth Judicial District, down 77 percent in the Seventh Judicial District, down 65 percent in Suffolk County and down 56 percent in the Fourth Judicial District.

The report also noted efforts to adopt automation in some systems that support court operations. Those efforts included a web-based jury management system, which replaced an “aging mainframe system,” and a new case management system for civil cases, according to the report.

Read the full report here.