Comment by _rm
2 days ago
Why do these cases take so long? Is it due to the "American rule", that encourages lawyers slowing everything down to rack up huge billings?
2 days ago
Why do these cases take so long? Is it due to the "American rule", that encourages lawyers slowing everything down to rack up huge billings?
Good question, but actually not.
The judges do absolutely everything they can to keep these things moving or settle. They force people to mediation, they force people to reduce the claims to get rid of shitty claims, etc. Everything they can to get the vast majority of cases that shouldn't need a judge to resolve (which is most of them), out of court. This does slow things down.
To give you a sense of how good we are at that (surprisingly), only 1% of federal civil cases (IE this kind) actually reach trial. Only 0.7% reach a jury. It's not evenly distributed across claim types, but if we could push people to that state faster, you'd get some speedup. Not as much as you think. In federal district court, you will get pushed to mediation very very quickly in most cases.
They also have special programs to handle complex litigation, to handle multi-district litigation, etc. From a process standpoint, it's more efficient than i think people give it credit for.
Trials themselves are usually quick (a few weeks). But even that volume is immense.
In 2024, there were 347,991 new civil cases filed in federal district courts. Up 22% (ie crazytown) from the year before. In 2025, so far, it's back down again, but we'll see. A few years ago it was >500,000 new federal civil cases in a year.
There are 94 federal district courts in the US, and 677 federal district judges.
The average number of pending cases over the past 12 months, per judgeship, currently stands at 757.
Maybe they work slow?
Nope - they have, on average, terminated 866 cases each in the past year. So uh, terminated more than 16 cases a week. Each.
See here: https://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/caseload-statist...
The number of district court judges is set by congress. It has been set at 677 for a long time. For the volume of cases that there are these days, it's not enough if you want them to go to trial in less than a few years.
If we ignore the deliberate abuse of things like binding arbitration, etc, it really does exist (as mediation does) to try to get people to stop wasting court time on things that don't need court.
Because while sure, you could always say "get more judges", it's very hard to say 500,000 new federal civil cases a year is not crazy. This is just federal district courts, too. State courts get 13-20 million new civil cases a year.
While plenty of lawyers play games, it's honestly mostly the clients. Lawyers just get all the blame.