Despite the various adages concerning statistics and lies, statistics don't lie. Instead, we often mislead ourselves by misinterpreting statistics. Court caseload statistics present numerous opportunities for this sort of self-deception. Obvious ways of looking at caseload data and obvious nostrums about assessing a court's caseload are sometimes just simply wrong. Their flaws are unappreciated not because they are hard to grasp, but because we are conditioned to think about statistics using apples-and-oranges or dicethrowing examples. Because significant time elapses over the life of many court cases, the better statistical analogy is that of human populations. Failure to appreciate how the lifespans of cases affect caseload statistics causes numerous misunderstandings. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate three closely related misunderstandings about caseload statistics, in the hope that a basic understanding of the problem can help prevent mistakes on the part of the various parties charged under the Civil Justice Reform Act with trying to improve the condition of court dockets.