Western Australian judicial authorities hope rising case delays will ease across the West Kimberley court circuit after calling in an extra magistrate.

The state's department of justice has scheduled an extra 12 weeks of sittings at the Broome Magistrates Court with the additional magistrate, a move it hoped would result in more people being sooner heard, amid significant family and domestic violence matters.

The sittings will be heard across the existing West Kimberley circuit, where the current Broome-based magistrate and lawyers travel to wider regional towns such as Derby and Fitzroy Crossing.

Plans to replace the 130-year-old heritage-listed Broome courthouse were raised in 2015, after concerns over the logistical functionality of the heritage-listed building, one of the state's busiest courtrooms.

The WA government in 2021 said it would allocate $5.5 million to the new facility, which it said would be operational by 2023.

Recent concerns and rising case hearings since then led the Department of Justice to propose a specialist domestic violence court in Broome. It said consultation and design work for the separate, specialised court for the town were continuing while renovations on the 135-year-old courthouse were also a consideration.

Perth-based criminal defence lawyer John Hawkins has worked the Kimberley court circuit for two decades and, while he appreciated the nostalgia connected with Broome's courthouse, issues with its function as a courtroom remained.

"The acoustics are quite poor and there is little privacy to speak with clients," he said.

"We don't have proper facilities to take instructions and there's no solution because the courthouse is a standalone building."

Mr Hawkins believed lawyers and the judiciary would welcome a new courthouse building for Broome, which has a population of 15,000 people.

"I think the community should expect a modern courthouse that can meet today's standards and demand for case matters to be heard," he said.

Mr Hawkins pointed to other new facilities in regional centres like Albany and Kununurra opening in recent years.

As more court matters continue to face delays, the Kimberley Community Legal Service (KCLS) said another pressing issue pressuring the sector were rising fuel costs.

KCLS chief executive officer, Matthew Panayi, said its employees travelled more than 56,000 kilometres for outreach services in the last financial year, but these could be limited if petrol prices remained high amid current global uncertainty.

He said demand for legal assistance across the region remained high, with about 40 per cent of KCLS's work allocated to family and domestic violence matters.

"We are concerned that, based on our current case load in 2026, a measurable decrease in risk for our clients has not resulted," Mr Panayi said.

The ongoing regional judiciary issues come as new data showed WA was the domestic violence capital of Australia.

WA Police statistics showed the Kimberley recorded 2413 family assaults in 2025-26 so far, a rate of 6198 family assaults per 100,000 people, nearly 13 times the metropolitan area (482.5), five times the regional WA rate (1303.3) and nearly 10 times the rate of WA as a whole.

Cases of family and domestic violence has hit an all-time high in WA, soaring 20 per cent in the past year, latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data last month showed.

A WA Ombudsman review released last month found 61 per cent of domestic violence cases reviewed met the threshold for high risk, but correct process was followed by police and specialist response teams only 2.5 per cent of the time in those cases.