Original Research

Federal Lawsuit Outcomes: What 10,960,173 Civil Cases Show About Settlements and Trials

We analyzed every civil case terminated in the 94 U.S. federal district courts since 1988 — 10,480,124 cases from the Federal Judicial Center’s Integrated Database. 24.02% ended in a recorded settlement, only 1.53% ever reached trial, and the median case closed in 240 days. Here is how that varies by case type, state, and year.

Reviewed by Leonard Goldberg, Editor · Published August 6, 2026 · Updated October 7, 2026

10,960,173

Federal civil cases analyzed

All 94 district courts, 1988–2026

1.53%

Reached trial

Jury verdicts, bench trials, and directed verdicts combined

24.02%

Recorded settlements

Plus 14.61% voluntary dismissals, which often follow settlements

240 days

Median time to resolution

From filing to termination, all case types

Key Findings

“95% of lawsuits settle” is one of the most repeated statistics in law — usually with no source attached. Court records tell a more precise story. This study computes actual disposition rates from every federal civil case the courts reported to the Administrative Office since 1988, without sampling or estimation.

The trial really is vanishing: 1.53% of cases reach one. In 1990, 3.37% of terminated cases ended in a trial; by 2024 it was 0.28%. Jury verdicts alone decide fewer than 1 in 100 federal civil cases.
24.02% of cases end in an explicitly recorded settlement — and another 14.61% end in voluntary dismissals that frequently follow private deals. That supports “most cases resolve consensually,” but not the cliché that 95% settle: dismissals on motions, jurisdiction, and procedure make up much of the rest.
Medical malpractice is the trial outlier: 6.9% of cases are tried — about 4.5× the overall rate — and its recovery median ($300K) is among the highest of any major category, consistent with the median malpractice payment reported in the National Practitioner Data Bank.
Motor vehicle cases settle most: 51.09%, with the highest plaintiff judgment share (48.28%) — liability in crash cases is comparatively clear, so they resolve faster (305 days median) and more often in the plaintiff’s favor.
Mass torts distort naive settlement rates. Product liability shows only 24.84% recorded settlements and a 2.1 yrs median duration — because MDL member cases (3M earplugs alone contributed ~396,000 filings in one district) sit consolidated for years and are closed administratively after global deals. Asbestos, the oldest mass tort, shows the pattern after maturity: 48.87% settled with a $1.5M median recovery where one was recorded.

Settlement and trial rates by case type

Terminated cases only. “Settled” is the share with disposition “dismissed: settled” — a lower bound, since voluntary dismissals often follow private settlements. “Plaintiff wins” is the plaintiff share of cases where judgment was entered for one side. Recovery medians cover only judgments where an amount was recorded, and reported amounts are capped — read them as orders of magnitude.

Case type	Cases	Settled	Reached trial	Plaintiff wins	Median duration	Median recovery
Medical Malpractice	49,131	36.52%	6.9%	23.7%	1.0 yrs	$300K
Motor Vehicle	209,457	51.09%	3.87%	48.28%	305 days	$100K
Product Liability (excl. asbestos)	1,215,158	24.84%	0.36%	11.54%	2.1 yrs	$277K
Asbestos	360,533	48.87%	0.18%	68.14%	182 days	$1.5M
Other Personal Injury	518,199	42.69%	4.63%	26.38%	319 days	$104K
Employment Discrimination / ADA	612,748	39.45%	3.46%	11.92%	332 days	$90K
Civil Rights (other)	632,893	25.97%	3.26%	11.48%	250 days	$50K
Wage & Hour (FLSA)	169,295	51.02%	1.38%	74.61%	246 days	$45K
Insurance	377,374	44%	1.81%	43.87%	265 days	$137K
Other Contract	597,443	32.71%	2.46%	68.13%	234 days	$151K
Fraud	73,284	24.79%	1.84%	41.7%	236 days	$283K
Antitrust	26,590	20.47%	1.72%	28.28%	299 days	$1.0M
ERISA	322,088	33.07%	0.81%	79.01%	182 days	$30K
Prisoner Civil Rights	1,087,390	5.34%	1.66%	2.09%	139 days	$6K
All Personal Injury (rollup)	2,352,478	35.04%	1.72%	25.55%	1.2 yrs	$143K

Case types are Administrative Office nature-of-suit code groups; the exact codes for each group ship in the CSV download. One row of court data is one case, not one claimant.

Federal case outcomes by state

All 10,480,124 terminated cases mapped from the 94 district courts to their states (multi-district states combine their districts). Ranked by recorded settlement rate. State differences mix caseload composition — a state hosting a large MDL inherits its disposition pattern — with genuine local practice, so read the rate together with the case count.

#	State	Cases	Settled	Voluntary dismissal	Reached trial	Median duration
1	West Virginia	206,053	55%	6.63%	0.41%	2.3 yrs
2	Pennsylvania	748,553	51.56%	5.91%	1.14%	171 days
3	Louisiana	383,221	38.29%	9.78%	3.68%	332 days
4	New Jersey	298,223	32.26%	12.3%	0.92%	211 days
5	Minnesota	138,213	30.88%	10.04%	0.91%	246 days
6	Mississippi	132,939	27.8%	7.82%	2.81%	284 days
7	Illinois	481,278	27.51%	17.48%	1.51%	197 days
8	Colorado	117,047	27.31%	13.11%	2.01%	187 days
9	New Mexico	55,932	26%	12.46%	2.04%	273 days
10	Massachusetts	132,769	25.76%	15.27%	2.26%	311 days
11	Montana	27,809	25.41%	9.16%	2.19%	286 days
12	Maine	22,472	25.28%	10.99%	3.36%	198 days
13	North Dakota	12,426	25.16%	7.19%	2.9%	245 days
14	Hawaii	33,438	25.07%	18.58%	2.05%	270 days
15	South Dakota	15,997	24.85%	6.49%	3.46%	245 days
16	Michigan	278,320	24.58%	7.69%	1.21%	239 days
17	Wyoming	13,058	24.57%	23.7%	4.51%	256 days
18	Connecticut	91,649	24.21%	19.35%	2.31%	306 days
19	Vermont	15,632	23.96%	23.63%	2.27%	213 days
20	Delaware	48,889	23.86%	20.26%	2.62%	269 days
21	Indiana	192,946	22.98%	10.89%	1.24%	245 days
22	Rhode Island	27,567	22.98%	19.36%	2.76%	313 days
23	New York	813,602	22.97%	15.67%	1.12%	254 days
24	Nebraska	37,674	22.76%	11.88%	3.64%	231 days
25	South Carolina	173,332	22.5%	9.75%	1.6%	263 days
26	Utah	49,880	22.35%	17.73%	1.58%	312 days
27	Georgia	289,873	22.16%	10.89%	1.51%	201 days
28	Maryland	152,472	22.15%	10.06%	1.53%	200 days
29	Washington	148,869	22.03%	11.68%	1.38%	207 days
30	New Hampshire	25,269	21.75%	21.81%	1.96%	316 days
31	Kansas	69,937	21.61%	15.37%	2.23%	238 days
32	Kentucky	127,283	21.5%	6.48%	1.48%	254 days
33	Oklahoma	130,139	21.49%	10.43%	2.12%	228 days
34	Arizona	153,350	21.23%	8.09%	1.09%	219 days
35	Oregon	87,196	20.28%	13.63%	2.09%	264 days
36	Alaska	18,705	19.2%	12.71%	1.59%	278 days
37	Wisconsin	94,819	19.06%	11.2%	1.98%	169 days
38	Ohio	322,408	19.03%	11.65%	0.95%	276 days
39	Texas	748,205	18.12%	10.45%	1.59%	206 days
40	Nevada	99,382	17.97%	13.86%	1.25%	254 days
41	California	1,038,747	17.61%	17.54%	0.92%	194 days
42	Alabama	227,277	17.51%	5.49%	1.94%	284 days
43	Tennessee	177,268	17.4%	13.57%	2.4%	263 days
44	Idaho	23,764	17.18%	16.84%	2%	323 days
45	Florida	1,063,130	15.82%	34.87%	0.86%	336 days
46	Arkansas	127,336	14.84%	13.62%	4.62%	284 days
47	Virginia	214,391	14.74%	10.84%	2.15%	147 days
48	North Carolina	147,952	14.02%	12.3%	1.81%	232 days
49	Iowa	59,865	13.87%	12.9%	3.5%	251 days
50	District of Columbia	115,395	13.52%	17.3%	1.51%	210 days
51	Missouri	193,391	12.35%	17.66%	2.26%	230 days

Territories (Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands) are excluded from the state table but included in national figures. For dollar benchmarks by state, see our settlement amounts by state study.

The vanishing trial, in one table

Legal scholars have documented the “vanishing trial” for two decades. The full yearly series (1988–2025, complete calendar years) ships in the CSV below; the trajectory is unambiguous:

Year	Cases terminated	Settled	Reached trial
1990	213,646	25.11%	3.37%
1995	233,482	22.1%	2.83%
2000	252,598	23.18%	1.87%
2005	281,071	20.44%	1.18%
2010	314,920	38.14%	0.85%
2015	273,205	28.71%	0.91%
2020	276,486	27.8%	0.39%
2024	528,057	10.52%	0.28%

A federal civil case filed today is roughly 12× less likely to end in a trial than one filed when this data begins. For anyone weighing a claim, the practical takeaway is that the negotiation, not the courtroom, is where almost every case is actually decided — which is why understanding settlement benchmarks matters more than verdict headlines.

Cite this research

This analysis is released as an open, citable dataset. Researchers and journalists are welcome to use it with attribution.

DOI

Permanent identifier

10.5281/zenodo.21815330

APA

Goldberg, L. (2026). Federal Lawsuit Outcomes — Disposition Statistics from 10.76 Million U.S. District Court Civil Cases, 1988–2025 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21815330

BibTeX

@dataset{goldberg_2026_fjc_outcomes,
  author    = {Goldberg, Leonard},
  title     = {{Federal Lawsuit Outcomes -- Disposition Statistics from 10.76 Million U.S. District Court Civil Cases, 1988--2025}},
  year      = 2026,
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.21815330},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21815330}
}

Download the data

Aggregated CSV files — CC BY 4.0. Free to use with attribution.

Methodology

The source is the Federal Judicial Center’s Integrated Database (IDB) — the official case-level record of federal litigation, built from data the district courts report to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. We analyzed the civil file covering cases on record from 1988 through June 30, 2026: 10,960,173 cases, of which 10,480,124 are terminations with a disposition code and 480,049 were still pending. Pending cases enter no share on this page.

Correction (October 10, 2026). Earlier versions of this study counted 446,667 cases that were still pending as terminations with a missing disposition code, because the FJC file marks a pending case with the placeholder date January 1, 1900. That understated every share — overall settlements by about one point, product liability by three (21.6% → 24.8% settled) — and reported 644 pending cases instead of several hundred thousand. All figures now exclude pending cases and use the FJC release of August 2026.

Settled = disposition code 13 (“dismissed: settled”). This is a lower bound: settlements concluded after a voluntary dismissal (code 12, 14.61%) are not separately identifiable in court records.
Reached trial = jury verdict, bench trial, or directed verdict codes. Cases settled during trial are counted by their final recorded disposition.
Case types group the AO nature-of-suit codes (e.g., medical malpractice = NOS 362); the exact grouping ships with the CSVs.
States map the 94 district courts via the AO court-location codes, which we verified against the county FIPS codes recorded on the cases themselves.
Amounts (demand and recovery) are reported to the courts in thousands of dollars and capped at reporting ceilings; we therefore publish only medians and percentiles, never sums, and recovery figures exist only for the minority of judgments where courts recorded one.
Durations are days from filing to termination, kept when between 0 and 50 years; the median across all terminations is 240 days.

All aggregates are computed directly from the IDB export in our settlement database; the aggregation code and every published table are deterministic and re-runnable. Aggregated tables are released under CC BY 4.0. This is federal data only — state courts, where most injury litigation happens, publish no comparable unified database.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of lawsuits settle before trial?

In 10,480,124 terminated federal civil cases, 24.02% ended with a disposition explicitly recorded as "dismissed: settled," and another 14.61% ended as voluntary dismissals — which frequently follow a private settlement. So the honest answer is: at least 24.02%, plausibly over 38.6%, settle or otherwise resolve consensually — while only 1.53% are decided at trial. Popular claims like "95% of cases settle" overstate what court records can support; much of the remainder ends in dismissals on motions, jurisdictional grounds, or procedural closings.

What percentage of lawsuits go to trial?

1.53% of terminated federal civil cases since 1988 were decided by a jury verdict (0.92%), a bench trial (0.53%), or a directed verdict (0.08%). The trial has been "vanishing" for decades: in 1990, 3.37% of terminations were trials; by 2024 it was 0.28%.

Which case types settle most often?

Among the major categories, motor vehicle injury cases have the highest recorded settlement rate (51.09%), followed by asbestos (48.87%) and other personal injury (42.69%). Medical malpractice settles 36.52% of the time but goes to trial far more often than anything else (6.9% — about 4.5× the overall rate), because liability is genuinely contested. Product liability shows a low recorded settlement rate (24.84%) — a statistical artifact of mass tort MDLs, where hundreds of thousands of member cases are closed administratively after global settlements.

How long does a federal lawsuit take?

The median terminated case closed 240 days (about 8 months) after filing. Case type matters enormously: motor vehicle cases have a median of 305 days, medical malpractice 1.0 yrs, and product liability 2.1 yrs — the long product-liability tail reflects years cases spend consolidated in multidistrict litigation.

How often do plaintiffs win at trial or judgment?

Of cases resolved by a judgment for one side, plaintiffs won 25.55% across personal-injury categories — but the spread is wide: 48.28% in motor vehicle cases versus 11.92% in employment discrimination. Two cautions: most cases never reach a judgment at all, and defendants tend to try the cases they think they can win, so win rates say as much about case selection as case merits.

Does this data cover state courts too?

No — this is every civil case in the 94 federal district courts, as reported to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and published by the Federal Judicial Center. Most personal-injury litigation actually happens in state courts, which have no comparable unified public database. Federal cases skew toward diversity jurisdiction (larger claims between citizens of different states), federal statutes, and mass torts — so treat these rates as a window into litigation dynamics, not a universal constant.

Related research

Settlement Amounts by State — dollar percentile benchmarks from 578,245 public payout records.
Medical Malpractice Settlement Statistics — the NPDB payment file in depth.
EEOC Discrimination Settlements — 2,386 announced resolutions, $1.95B: the median is $110K, not the headlines.
Settlement Trends — how payouts have moved over three decades.

Original Research

Federal Lawsuit Outcomes: What 10,960,173 Civil Cases Show About Settlements and Trials

Reviewed by Leonard Goldberg, Editor · Published August 6, 2026 · Updated October 7, 2026

10,960,173

Federal civil cases analyzed

All 94 district courts, 1988–2026

1.53%

Reached trial

Jury verdicts, bench trials, and directed verdicts combined

24.02%

Recorded settlements

Plus 14.61% voluntary dismissals, which often follow settlements

240 days

Median time to resolution

From filing to termination, all case types

Key Findings

The trial really is vanishing: 1.53% of cases reach one. In 1990, 3.37% of terminated cases ended in a trial; by 2024 it was 0.28%. Jury verdicts alone decide fewer than 1 in 100 federal civil cases.
24.02% of cases end in an explicitly recorded settlement — and another 14.61% end in voluntary dismissals that frequently follow private deals. That supports “most cases resolve consensually,” but not the cliché that 95% settle: dismissals on motions, jurisdiction, and procedure make up much of the rest.
Medical malpractice is the trial outlier: 6.9% of cases are tried — about 4.5× the overall rate — and its recovery median ($300K) is among the highest of any major category, consistent with the median malpractice payment reported in the National Practitioner Data Bank.
Motor vehicle cases settle most: 51.09%, with the highest plaintiff judgment share (48.28%) — liability in crash cases is comparatively clear, so they resolve faster (305 days median) and more often in the plaintiff’s favor.
Mass torts distort naive settlement rates. Product liability shows only 24.84% recorded settlements and a 2.1 yrs median duration — because MDL member cases (3M earplugs alone contributed ~396,000 filings in one district) sit consolidated for years and are closed administratively after global deals. Asbestos, the oldest mass tort, shows the pattern after maturity: 48.87% settled with a $1.5M median recovery where one was recorded.

Settlement and trial rates by case type

Case type	Cases	Settled	Reached trial	Plaintiff wins	Median duration	Median recovery
Medical Malpractice	49,131	36.52%	6.9%	23.7%	1.0 yrs	$300K
Motor Vehicle	209,457	51.09%	3.87%	48.28%	305 days	$100K
Product Liability (excl. asbestos)	1,215,158	24.84%	0.36%	11.54%	2.1 yrs	$277K
Asbestos	360,533	48.87%	0.18%	68.14%	182 days	$1.5M
Other Personal Injury	518,199	42.69%	4.63%	26.38%	319 days	$104K
Employment Discrimination / ADA	612,748	39.45%	3.46%	11.92%	332 days	$90K
Civil Rights (other)	632,893	25.97%	3.26%	11.48%	250 days	$50K
Wage & Hour (FLSA)	169,295	51.02%	1.38%	74.61%	246 days	$45K
Insurance	377,374	44%	1.81%	43.87%	265 days	$137K
Other Contract	597,443	32.71%	2.46%	68.13%	234 days	$151K
Fraud	73,284	24.79%	1.84%	41.7%	236 days	$283K
Antitrust	26,590	20.47%	1.72%	28.28%	299 days	$1.0M
ERISA	322,088	33.07%	0.81%	79.01%	182 days	$30K
Prisoner Civil Rights	1,087,390	5.34%	1.66%	2.09%	139 days	$6K
All Personal Injury (rollup)	2,352,478	35.04%	1.72%	25.55%	1.2 yrs	$143K

Case types are Administrative Office nature-of-suit code groups; the exact codes for each group ship in the CSV download. One row of court data is one case, not one claimant.

Federal case outcomes by state

#	State	Cases	Settled	Voluntary dismissal	Reached trial	Median duration
1	West Virginia	206,053	55%	6.63%	0.41%	2.3 yrs
2	Pennsylvania	748,553	51.56%	5.91%	1.14%	171 days
3	Louisiana	383,221	38.29%	9.78%	3.68%	332 days
4	New Jersey	298,223	32.26%	12.3%	0.92%	211 days
5	Minnesota	138,213	30.88%	10.04%	0.91%	246 days
6	Mississippi	132,939	27.8%	7.82%	2.81%	284 days
7	Illinois	481,278	27.51%	17.48%	1.51%	197 days
8	Colorado	117,047	27.31%	13.11%	2.01%	187 days
9	New Mexico	55,932	26%	12.46%	2.04%	273 days
10	Massachusetts	132,769	25.76%	15.27%	2.26%	311 days
11	Montana	27,809	25.41%	9.16%	2.19%	286 days
12	Maine	22,472	25.28%	10.99%	3.36%	198 days
13	North Dakota	12,426	25.16%	7.19%	2.9%	245 days
14	Hawaii	33,438	25.07%	18.58%	2.05%	270 days
15	South Dakota	15,997	24.85%	6.49%	3.46%	245 days
16	Michigan	278,320	24.58%	7.69%	1.21%	239 days
17	Wyoming	13,058	24.57%	23.7%	4.51%	256 days
18	Connecticut	91,649	24.21%	19.35%	2.31%	306 days
19	Vermont	15,632	23.96%	23.63%	2.27%	213 days
20	Delaware	48,889	23.86%	20.26%	2.62%	269 days
21	Indiana	192,946	22.98%	10.89%	1.24%	245 days
22	Rhode Island	27,567	22.98%	19.36%	2.76%	313 days
23	New York	813,602	22.97%	15.67%	1.12%	254 days
24	Nebraska	37,674	22.76%	11.88%	3.64%	231 days
25	South Carolina	173,332	22.5%	9.75%	1.6%	263 days
26	Utah	49,880	22.35%	17.73%	1.58%	312 days
27	Georgia	289,873	22.16%	10.89%	1.51%	201 days
28	Maryland	152,472	22.15%	10.06%	1.53%	200 days
29	Washington	148,869	22.03%	11.68%	1.38%	207 days
30	New Hampshire	25,269	21.75%	21.81%	1.96%	316 days
31	Kansas	69,937	21.61%	15.37%	2.23%	238 days
32	Kentucky	127,283	21.5%	6.48%	1.48%	254 days
33	Oklahoma	130,139	21.49%	10.43%	2.12%	228 days
34	Arizona	153,350	21.23%	8.09%	1.09%	219 days
35	Oregon	87,196	20.28%	13.63%	2.09%	264 days
36	Alaska	18,705	19.2%	12.71%	1.59%	278 days
37	Wisconsin	94,819	19.06%	11.2%	1.98%	169 days
38	Ohio	322,408	19.03%	11.65%	0.95%	276 days
39	Texas	748,205	18.12%	10.45%	1.59%	206 days
40	Nevada	99,382	17.97%	13.86%	1.25%	254 days
41	California	1,038,747	17.61%	17.54%	0.92%	194 days
42	Alabama	227,277	17.51%	5.49%	1.94%	284 days
43	Tennessee	177,268	17.4%	13.57%	2.4%	263 days
44	Idaho	23,764	17.18%	16.84%	2%	323 days
45	Florida	1,063,130	15.82%	34.87%	0.86%	336 days
46	Arkansas	127,336	14.84%	13.62%	4.62%	284 days
47	Virginia	214,391	14.74%	10.84%	2.15%	147 days
48	North Carolina	147,952	14.02%	12.3%	1.81%	232 days
49	Iowa	59,865	13.87%	12.9%	3.5%	251 days
50	District of Columbia	115,395	13.52%	17.3%	1.51%	210 days
51	Missouri	193,391	12.35%	17.66%	2.26%	230 days

The vanishing trial, in one table

Legal scholars have documented the “vanishing trial” for two decades. The full yearly series (1988–2025, complete calendar years) ships in the CSV below; the trajectory is unambiguous:

Year	Cases terminated	Settled	Reached trial
1990	213,646	25.11%	3.37%
1995	233,482	22.1%	2.83%
2000	252,598	23.18%	1.87%
2005	281,071	20.44%	1.18%
2010	314,920	38.14%	0.85%
2015	273,205	28.71%	0.91%
2020	276,486	27.8%	0.39%
2024	528,057	10.52%	0.28%

Cite this research

This analysis is released as an open, citable dataset. Researchers and journalists are welcome to use it with attribution.

DOI

Permanent identifier

10.5281/zenodo.21815330

APA

Goldberg, L. (2026). Federal Lawsuit Outcomes — Disposition Statistics from 10.76 Million U.S. District Court Civil Cases, 1988–2025 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21815330

BibTeX

@dataset{goldberg_2026_fjc_outcomes,
  author    = {Goldberg, Leonard},
  title     = {{Federal Lawsuit Outcomes -- Disposition Statistics from 10.76 Million U.S. District Court Civil Cases, 1988--2025}},
  year      = 2026,
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.21815330},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21815330}
}

Download the data

Aggregated CSV files — CC BY 4.0. Free to use with attribution.

Methodology

Settled = disposition code 13 (“dismissed: settled”). This is a lower bound: settlements concluded after a voluntary dismissal (code 12, 14.61%) are not separately identifiable in court records.
Reached trial = jury verdict, bench trial, or directed verdict codes. Cases settled during trial are counted by their final recorded disposition.
Case types group the AO nature-of-suit codes (e.g., medical malpractice = NOS 362); the exact grouping ships with the CSVs.
States map the 94 district courts via the AO court-location codes, which we verified against the county FIPS codes recorded on the cases themselves.
Amounts (demand and recovery) are reported to the courts in thousands of dollars and capped at reporting ceilings; we therefore publish only medians and percentiles, never sums, and recovery figures exist only for the minority of judgments where courts recorded one.
Durations are days from filing to termination, kept when between 0 and 50 years; the median across all terminations is 240 days.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of lawsuits settle before trial?

What percentage of lawsuits go to trial?

Which case types settle most often?

How long does a federal lawsuit take?

How often do plaintiffs win at trial or judgment?

Does this data cover state courts too?

Related research

Settlement Amounts by State — dollar percentile benchmarks from 578,245 public payout records.
Medical Malpractice Settlement Statistics — the NPDB payment file in depth.
EEOC Discrimination Settlements — 2,386 announced resolutions, $1.95B: the median is $110K, not the headlines.
Settlement Trends — how payouts have moved over three decades.

Federal Lawsuit Outcomes: What 10,960,173 Civil Cases Show About Settlements and Trials

Key Findings

Settlement and trial rates by case type

Federal case outcomes by state

The vanishing trial, in one table

Cite this research

APA

BibTeX

Download the data

Methodology

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of lawsuits settle before trial?

What percentage of lawsuits go to trial?

Which case types settle most often?

How long does a federal lawsuit take?

How often do plaintiffs win at trial or judgment?

Does this data cover state courts too?

Related research

Settlements you can still claim