Bankruptcy Cases = 75% Of All Federal Court Filings? (A Study)

By: Donald L Swanson

“Consistently, the highest percentage of filings in the federal docket is bankruptcy cases, which can be up to 75% of filings.”

That’s a conclusion by the authors of a 2014 study.[Fn. 1] 

Bankruptcy-Specific

Here are bankruptcy-specific details and explanations from that same study:

• The number of bankruptcy cases tend to fluctuate with the economic climate.
• For example:
  • in 1997, there were almost 1,500,000 bankruptcy cases filed in federal court;
  • in 2007 by contrast, there were 800,000 bankruptcy filings; but
  • by 2010, federal bankruptcy filings were again over 1,500,000 per year.[Fn. 2]

All Filings

The same study provides additional detail, such as: over 100 million lawsuits (including bankruptcy cases) are filed in the United States each year.

In 2010, for example, the breakdown of filing numbers is (emphasis added):

• 106 million cases are filed in state and federal courts in the United States;
• only 2 million of those cases are filed in federal court, consisting of—
  • 300,000 civil cases;
  • 100,000 criminal defendants (federal courts report defendants, not cases);
  • over 1.5 million bankruptcy cases; and
  • other categories of post-conviction supervision and pretrial supervision;
• 104 million of those cases are filed in state courts, including—
  • 55 million traffic cases;
  • 21 million criminal cases;
  • 20 million civil cases;
  • 6 million domestic cases; and
  • 2 million juvenile cases.[Fn. 3]

Conclusion

Such statistics are surprising:

• Who would’ve guessed that bankruptcy provides up to 75% of federal court cases? 
• And who would’ve guessed that state court cases outnumber federal court cases by a factor of 104-to-2?

Lots of people, probably.

But for the rest of us, as the saying goes: “Learn something new every day.”

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Footnote 1.  The study is by John Barkai and Elizabeth Kent titled, “Let’s Stop Spreading Rumors About Settlement and Litigation: A Comparative Study of Settlement and Litigation in Hawaii Courts,” and is published at 29 Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution, 85-158 (2014).  The “75% of filings” quote is at page 96.

Footnote 2.  Id., at 97.

Footnote 3.  Id., at 95.

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