When the Insurance Company Sues: Who Files Federal Insurance Lawsuits

We kept every case with nature of suit code 110 (Insurance) filed between October 1, 2005 and September 30, 2025, 232,993 records in all, and assigned each to a federal fiscal year (October 1 to September 30) by the filing date field, not by the FJC reporting year. Every record is counted; records that repeat a case (same district, docket number and filing date, reported again in a later year) are not removed, as in the courts' published filing counts. As in the courts' own Table C-2, the count includes original filings, removals, reopened, remanded and transferred cases. For FY2025 we count 13,142 insurance cases; Table C-2 of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reports 13,161, a difference of 0.14%. For the split by how a case reached federal court, “filed directly in federal court” means IDB origin code 1 (original proceeding) and “removed” means origin code 2 (removed from state court); reopened, remanded, transferred and multidistrict litigation cases (origin codes 3 to 13) form a third group.

A case counts as insurer-filed when the first-listed plaintiff, as recorded in the IDB (field plaintiff), passes a fixed word rule, applied the same way to every record without case-by-case review. The name is put in capital letters, apostrophes (' and ’) are deleted, and every character other than the letters A to Z (spaces, punctuation, digits, “&”) separates words; “et al.” is not removed. A term matches when it occurs starting at the beginning of a word; its last word may be the beginning of a longer word (INSU matches INSURANCE and the cut-off INSURANC, PROPERTY AND C matches PROPERTY AND CASUALTY). Exclusion terms take precedence: a name containing AGEN, BROKER, ADJUST, SOLUTION, SVCS, INSURANCE SERVICE, COMMISSIONER, INSOLVEN, GUARANTY ASSOC, GUARANTY FUND, SELF INSURED, WOODMEN, INSUL, CONSTRUCT, ROOFING, RESTORATION, MUTUAL HOUSING, MUTUAL FUND or MUTUAL WHOL is not an insurer. Otherwise the plaintiff is an insurer if the name contains one of the whole words INS, MUTUAL or RRG, or one of these terms: INSU, ASSUR, INDEMN, CASU, UNDERWR, SURET, LLOYDS, ANNUIT, RISK RETENTI, SURPLUS LI, EXCESS AND SURPL, EXCESS SURPL, SPECIALTY UNDER, LIFE COMPANY, COMPANY FOR LIF, PROPERTY AND C, MARINE AND GENERAL, STATE FARM, ALLSTATE, GEICO, GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, USAA, ACUITY, BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY, CHARTER OAK, HDI GLOBAL, MEDICAL PROTECTIVE, AETNA, ANTHEM, BLUE CROSS or BLUE SHIELD. Nothing else counts: names cut off before any of these terms (for example “Southwest Marine and General I” is caught, “American General Life I” is not), misspellings and insurers without such a word in their name are not insurer-filed, and agencies or other firms whose name contains a term are. Cases without a recorded plaintiff name count as not insurer-filed. For the ranking, spelling variants of the same name were combined: we treated “&” and “and”, “Co.” and “Company”, “Ins.” and “Insurance” as equal, ignored punctuation, a leading “The”, a trailing “Inc.”, “LLC” or “et al.”, and joined each truncated name with the longer names that begin with it; where a truncated name could belong to more than one longer name, it was assigned to the one with more cases. Names beginning with Acuity were combined under Acuity, A Mutual Insurance Company. Separate legal entities of the same group, such as State Farm Fire and Casualty Company and State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, were not combined.