U.S. Department of Justice: Federal Tort Filings Down

New study contradicts claims of a "litigation explosion."

A report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that tort cases in federal courts have dropped dramatically over the last 20 years, by almost 80%.

Key findings include:

• The number of tort cases resolved in U.S. district courts fell 79 percent between 1985 and 2003.
  
  
• In 1985, 3,600 tort trials were decided by a judge or jury in U.S. district courts. By 2003, that number had dropped to less than 800.
  
  
• The number of tort cases decided by a judge or jury as a percentage of all tort cases fell from 10 percent in 1970 to 2 percent in 2003.
  
  
• In the fiscal years of 2002-03, 98% of personal injury cases were resolved by mediation, settled out of court, or handled in some non-trial disposition. Only 2% of cases required trials to be resolved.
  

Medical Malpractice Cases Fall

Between 1990 and 2003, plaintiffs received monetary damages in only 28 percent of malpractice trials. Due to the decrease in the number of trials won by plaintiffs from 50 to 24 per year, the overall estimated median payouts fell 59 percent during the same time period.

Product Liability Cases Fall

The number of non-asbestos product liability trials decreased by two-thirds between 1990 and 2003, from 279 to 87. Few asbestos cases are resolved by trial. In 1991, there were 271 asbestos cases decided in U.S. district courts. In 2000, 2002 and 2003, there were none.

State Courts Also See Decline

The decrease in lawsuits at the federal level is also reflected in state court trends. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division of the Department of Justice, performed a study of civil trials in state courts and found that the number of civil trials dropped by 47% between 1992 and 2001. The number of personal injury cases decreased 31.8% during the same period.

Damages

The DOJ found that "punitive damages tend to be awarded infrequently in tort trials."

Reasons for the Decline

The DOJ cites two reasons for the steady decline in lawsuits. First, there's been a steadily growing use of alternative dispute resolution rather than trials. The American Association for Justice has been a long-time supporter of voluntary mediation to help the parties in a case resolve their conflict before ever entering a courtroom.

Second, the increasing cost and complexity of bringing a case to trial has made it harder than ever for an injured consumer to get into the courtroom in the first place.

Conclusions

The real story about the civil justice system isn't an explosion of litigation—as this DOJ study and countless others prove—it's that the civil justice system remains the last line of defense for ordinary American families against corporate CEOs who put their bottom line before the safety of their own customers and all Americans.

Source: Cohen, Thomas H., Federal Tort Trials and Verdicts, 2002-03, Bureau of Justice Statistics, August 17, 2005.

August 2005