Survival analysis is a family of statistical methods for modeling the time until an event occurs, designed to handle subjects whose event has not yet happened. For legal matters, the event is resolution and the open matters are the censored ones.
Duration data have two features that ordinary averages handle badly: the distribution is skewed, and many observations are incomplete because the matter is still open. Survival methods use the information in open matters correctly instead of dropping them.
They also produce the objects a planner needs: the share of matters resolved by a given age, the conditional distribution for a matter that has already survived to some age, and the hazard of resolution at each point in time.
Survival analysis is not a prediction of one matter's date. It is a description of how a population's resolution times are distributed, applied to a cohort.
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