Original Research

Federal Lawsuit Outcomes: What 10,760,870 Civil Cases Show About Settlements and Trials

We analyzed every civil case terminated in the 94 U.S. federal district courts since 1988 — 10,760,226 cases from the Federal Judicial Center’s Integrated Database. 23.14% ended in a recorded settlement, only 1.49% ever reached trial, and the median case closed in 242 days. Here is how that varies by case type, state, and year.

Reviewed by Leonard Goldberg, Editor · Published August 6, 2026

10,760,870

Federal civil cases analyzed

All 94 district courts, 1988–2025

1.49%

Reached trial

Jury verdicts, bench trials, and directed verdicts combined

23.14%

Recorded settlements

Plus 13.96% voluntary dismissals, which often follow settlements

242 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: 1.49% 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.
23.14% of cases end in an explicitly recorded settlement — and another 13.96% 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: 6.75% 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: 49.24%, with the highest plaintiff judgment share (48.42%) — liability in crash cases is comparatively clear, so they resolve faster (306 days median) and more often in the plaintiff’s favor.
Mass torts distort naive settlement rates. Product liability shows only 21.62% 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: 48.83% 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	50,012	35.63%	6.75%	23.79%	1.0 yrs	$300K
Motor Vehicle	213,757	49.24%	3.78%	48.42%	306 days	$100K
Product Liability (excl. asbestos)	1,392,889	21.62%	0.32%	11.6%	2.1 yrs	$277K
Asbestos	360,767	48.83%	0.18%	68.25%	182 days	$1.5M
Other Personal Injury	535,130	40.84%	4.47%	26.43%	320 days	$103K
Employment Discrimination / ADA	625,334	38.11%	3.38%	11.94%	332 days	$90K
Civil Rights (other)	644,691	25.28%	3.19%	11.55%	251 days	$48K
Wage & Hour (FLSA)	172,678	49.36%	1.34%	74.42%	245 days	$44K
Insurance	384,431	42.43%	1.77%	43.81%	265 days	$135K
Other Contract	605,453	31.99%	2.42%	68.17%	234 days	$150K
Fraud	75,078	23.99%	1.78%	41.58%	237 days	$280K
Antitrust	27,967	19.42%	1.63%	28.3%	301 days	$1.0M
ERISA	324,037	32.6%	0.8%	79.01%	182 days	$30K
Prisoner Civil Rights	1,101,761	5.19%	1.63%	2.08%	139 days	$5K
All Personal Injury (rollup)	2,552,555	32.08%	1.58%	25.62%	1.2 yrs	$141K

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 10,760,226 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	207,764	54.47%	6.54%	0.4%	2.3 yrs
2	Pennsylvania	755,916	50.86%	5.74%	1.12%	171 days
3	Louisiana	386,652	37.68%	9.57%	3.64%	331 days
4	Minnesota	146,439	28.81%	9.2%	0.85%	250 days
5	Mississippi	136,173	26.94%	7.51%	2.73%	285 days
6	Colorado	118,653	26.71%	12.57%	1.97%	188 days
7	Illinois	506,825	25.82%	16.09%	1.42%	198 days
8	New Mexico	56,089	25.68%	12.21%	2.03%	278 days
9	Montana	27,973	25.04%	8.88%	2.16%	289 days
10	Massachusetts	136,147	24.84%	14.52%	2.2%	315 days
11	Maine	22,703	24.78%	10.65%	3.29%	198 days
12	Hawaii	33,635	24.77%	18.25%	2.02%	270 days
13	New Jersey	383,410	24.69%	9.27%	0.71%	212 days
14	North Dakota	12,557	24.65%	6.96%	2.87%	246 days
15	South Dakota	16,254	24.3%	6.1%	3.4%	245 days
16	Michigan	280,124	24.17%	7.51%	1.2%	240 days
17	Connecticut	93,066	23.64%	18.8%	2.26%	307 days
18	Wyoming	13,399	23.62%	22.99%	4.39%	256 days
19	Vermont	15,802	23.49%	22.79%	2.23%	216 days
20	Delaware	50,247	23.04%	19.34%	2.53%	269 days
21	Rhode Island	27,914	22.38%	18.94%	2.72%	316 days
22	Nebraska	38,154	22.28%	11.55%	3.59%	231 days
23	New York	830,677	22.25%	14.98%	1.1%	256 days
24	Washington	149,893	21.74%	11.21%	1.37%	209 days
25	Indiana	201,673	21.64%	10.2%	1.18%	245 days
26	Georgia	291,573	21.59%	10.5%	1.5%	203 days
27	Maryland	154,404	21.56%	9.68%	1.5%	200 days
28	Utah	50,977	21.52%	17.12%	1.54%	313 days
29	Kentucky	128,143	21.2%	6.29%	1.47%	256 days
30	Kansas	70,307	21.17%	15.15%	2.21%	239 days
31	New Hampshire	25,845	21.13%	20.55%	1.9%	320 days
32	Oklahoma	131,178	21.13%	10.22%	2.07%	229 days
33	Arizona	156,261	20.54%	7.78%	1.06%	224 days
34	South Carolina	192,510	20.01%	8.54%	1.44%	263 days
35	Oregon	88,550	19.66%	13.2%	2.04%	264 days
36	Alaska	18,928	18.88%	12.29%	1.57%	280 days
37	Wisconsin	96,106	18.55%	10.84%	1.94%	169 days
38	Texas	753,244	17.71%	10.07%	1.57%	209 days
39	Nevada	101,404	17.29%	13.39%	1.22%	256 days
40	Ohio	353,790	17.22%	10.31%	0.86%	276 days
41	Alabama	229,415	17.16%	5.37%	1.91%	284 days
42	California	1,053,377	17.1%	16.76%	0.9%	196 days
43	Tennessee	180,030	16.98%	13.25%	2.36%	263 days
44	Idaho	24,255	16.7%	16.19%	1.95%	324 days
45	Florida	1,064,286	15.51%	34.7%	0.86%	341 days
46	Arkansas	128,551	14.56%	13.42%	4.57%	284 days
47	Virginia	215,696	14.5%	10.52%	2.14%	147 days
48	Iowa	60,161	13.65%	12.75%	3.47%	252 days
49	North Carolina	153,801	13.26%	11.61%	1.72%	232 days
50	District of Columbia	119,197	12.91%	16.3%	1.45%	210 days
51	Missouri	194,337	12.11%	17.37%	2.23%	231 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) 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 terminated from 1988 through 2025: 10,760,870 cases, of which 10,760,226 are terminations with a disposition code.

Settled = disposition code 13 (“dismissed: settled”). This is a lower bound: settlements concluded after a voluntary dismissal (code 12, 13.96%) 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 242 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 10,760,226 terminated federal civil cases, 23.14% ended with a disposition explicitly recorded as "dismissed: settled," and another 13.96% ended as voluntary dismissals — which frequently follow a private settlement. So the honest answer is: at least 23.14%, plausibly over 37.1%, settle or otherwise resolve consensually — while only 1.49% 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?

1.49% of terminated federal civil cases since 1988 were decided by a jury verdict (0.89%), a bench trial (0.52%), 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 (49.24%), followed by asbestos (48.83%) and other personal injury (40.84%). Medical malpractice settles 35.63% of the time but goes to trial far more often than anything else (6.75% — about 4.5× the overall rate), because liability is genuinely contested. Product liability shows a low recorded settlement rate (21.62%) — 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 242 days (about 8 months) after filing. Case type matters enormously: motor vehicle cases have a median of 306 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 25.62% across personal-injury categories — but the spread is wide: 48.42% in motor vehicle cases versus 11.94% 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.