By almost every available measure, the most litigious states in the United States are California, New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey. They lead in raw civil filing counts, dominate business-community rankings of unfriendly court climates, and host the courts that produce the largest and most frequent jury verdicts. Each gets there for slightly different reasons, and understanding those reasons matters because litigation volume shows up in insurance premiums, consumer prices, and how long an ordinary case takes to reach trial.
The States That Top the Rankings
New York
New York’s trial courts recorded over 1,038,000 civil filings in 2024, placing the state at or near the top for sheer volume.1New York State Unified Court System. 2024 Annual Report New York City is also one of the jurisdictions most frequently singled out by defense-side analysts for plaintiff-friendly procedural rules and large verdicts. Population explains part of the number, but the concentration of corporate headquarters, financial services firms, and real estate activity in the metro area generates a deeper pipeline of contract, employment, and securities disputes than any other state.
California
California’s superior courts handled roughly 733,000 civil cases in fiscal year 2022–23, including about 256,000 unlimited civil cases, 402,000 limited civil cases, and 75,000 small claims.2Judicial Council of California. 2024 Court Statistics Report California stands out for the volume of lawsuits generated by its own statutes. The Private Attorneys General Act lets employees sue to recover civil penalties on behalf of the state for labor code violations, producing thousands of notices every year.3Department of Industrial Relations. Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) – Filing Proposition 65, which requires businesses to warn consumers about chemical exposures, drives thousands more 60-day notices and lawsuits each year, many focused on technical labeling rather than demonstrated harm.4State of California – Department of Justice – Office of the Attorney General. 60-Day Notice Search Los Angeles ranks first in the American Tort Reform Association’s 2025–2026 list of problem jurisdictions, and the state as a whole has consistently placed near the bottom of the Institute for Legal Reform’s survey of in-house counsel at companies with at least $100 million in annual revenue.5Institute for Legal Reform. 2019 Lawsuit Climate Survey: Ranking the States
Florida
Florida’s reputation came almost entirely from one category: homeowners’ insurance litigation. Before recent reforms, the state generated roughly 76 percent of the nation’s homeowners’ insurance lawsuits despite being home to only about 9 percent of U.S. homeowners, and in 2022 Florida accounted for about 71 percent of such suits while producing only about 15 percent of nationwide claims.6Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. Residential Property Claims and Litigation Report Hurricane damage disputes and the state’s one-way attorney fee rule did most of the work. Legislation passed in 2022 and 2023 has reshaped the picture considerably, as discussed below.
Illinois
Illinois reported over 1.6 million new filings statewide in 2024 across all case types, with Cook County functioning as one of the busiest trial court systems in the country.7Office of the Illinois Courts. Circuit Court Statistical Dashboard The Cook, Madison, and St. Clair County cluster is a regular fixture on defense-side problem-jurisdiction lists, and the state has sat near the bottom of business-community perception rankings for years. Illinois is also one of the top destinations for ADA website accessibility lawsuits, which cluster in a handful of plaintiff-friendly jurisdictions.
New Jersey
New Jersey rounds out the top tier largely because of its multicounty litigation program, which consolidates thousands of individual product liability and pharmaceutical injury claims into centralized dockets. That procedural setup draws mass tort filings from across the country into a small number of New Jersey courtrooms, inflating the state’s civil caseload relative to its population.
What’s Really Being Measured
No single number captures how litigious a state is, and the rankings above draw on several overlapping metrics. Raw filing volume tracks population to a significant degree, so analysts also use per capita filing rates, which can push smaller states with aggressive plaintiff bars up the list. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform publishes a perception-based ranking built from surveys of corporate counsel and litigators. The American Tort Reform Association’s annual Judicial Hellholes report names specific courts or regions rather than entire states, which is why a state like Pennsylvania can get flagged primarily because of Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas while the rest of the state goes unmentioned.
Jury award data adds another dimension. Verdicts above $10 million, often called nuclear verdicts, climbed sharply over the last decade, and awards above $100 million hit an all-time high of at least 23 in 2023, roughly a 400 percent increase from 2013.8Institute for Legal Reform. Nuclear Verdicts: An Update on Trends, Causes, and Solutions The median nuclear verdict across the study period was $21 million, with product liability cases peaking at a $36 million median in 2022. States whose juries produce these awards more often pose outsized risk for defendants and their insurers.
Why These States Produce So Many Lawsuits
Population and Corporate Density
States with large populations and clusters of Fortune 500 headquarters generate more lawsuits almost mechanically. More people means more car accidents, consumer transactions, and employment relationships. Corporate hubs attract product liability and securities litigation because that’s where the deep-pocket defendants sit.
Plaintiff-Friendly Statutes
Some states have deliberately built private lawsuits into their enforcement systems. California’s PAGA is the clearest example, effectively outsourcing labor code enforcement to private attorneys. Consumer protection statutes that force a losing defendant to pay the plaintiff’s attorney fees create a similar incentive, lowering the financial risk of suing and encouraging filings even when the underlying damages are modest.
Contingency Fee Practice
Personal injury and many other civil plaintiffs can hire lawyers on contingency in every state, with the attorney taking a percentage of any recovery and the client paying nothing upfront on a loss. The arrangement removes the financial barrier to filing, which matters most in complex cases where hourly fees would otherwise run into six figures. States with large plaintiff-side firms built around high-volume contingency practice produce correspondingly high filings.
Insurance Market Rules
Florida is the textbook case. Before reform, the state’s one-way attorney fee rule meant a policyholder who won any part of an insurance dispute could force the insurer to pay their legal costs, while the insurer could not recover its own costs even when it largely prevailed. That asymmetry turned insurance disputes into near-zero-risk litigation for plaintiffs’ lawyers, and the filing numbers followed.
The Case Types Filling the Dockets
Tort cases involving motor vehicle accidents, premises liability, and property insurance remain the staple of civil courts in high-volume states. Property insurance litigation has concentrated heavily in Florida and Louisiana, where hurricane damage drives thousands of coverage disputes each storm season.
Employment litigation runs heavy in states with strict labor codes, California most of all. Wrongful termination, wage theft, meal and rest break violations, and misclassification claims fill dockets year-round, and PAGA can turn an individual claim into a company-wide penalty exposure.
Consumer class actions targeting product labeling, data privacy, and deceptive business practices represent a growing share of filings. ADA website accessibility suits have surged over the past decade: in the first quarter of 2026 alone, over 1,000 were filed nationwide, a 5.5 percent increase over the same period in 2025, with Illinois, California, Florida, and New York accounting for most of the activity. A small number of plaintiff-side firms file hundreds of nearly identical complaints, which is why the cases concentrate in jurisdictions where precedent and procedure favor the plaintiff.
What It Costs to Live in a High-Litigation State
Nationwide, tort costs reached an estimated $529 billion in 2022, roughly 2.1 percent of GDP and about $4,200 per American household.9Institute for Legal Reform. Tort Costs in America Those costs don’t appear on a line item. They’re embedded in higher prices for consumer goods, elevated insurance premiums, and defensive business practices like over-documentation and unnecessary testing.
For businesses, the most direct impact is commercial liability insurance. Insurers price policies partly on the litigation climate of the state where the business operates, so a contractor in a jurisdiction known for large jury awards pays more for the same coverage than an identical contractor in a state with damage caps and predictable courts. Rising nuclear verdicts compound the problem: when the mean award reaches $89 million, insurers raise rates across entire industries and regions rather than only for the specific defendants who lost.
Where Reform Has Changed the Picture
Florida’s back-to-back reforms are the most aggressive recent effort to curb filings. Senate Bill 2-A, signed in late 2022, eliminated one-way attorney fees for residential and commercial property insurance disputes, abolished assignment-of-benefits arrangements for new policies, cut the deadline for reporting property claims from two years to one, and tightened the standard for bad-faith insurer lawsuits. House Bill 837, passed the following year, extended the fee-shifting reforms to other insurance lines and imposed a modified comparative fault standard: a plaintiff found more than 50 percent responsible for their own injury recovers nothing.10Florida Senate. CS/CS/HB 837: Civil Remedies
The results have been dramatic. Total lawsuit filings in Florida dropped more than 30 percent in 2024–25, and property insurance litigation fell to levels last seen in 2019. Homeowners’ insurance rate growth in the state slowed to less than one percent by late 2024, while the national average held around 10 percent. Dozens of insurers filed for rate decreases or held rates flat, reversing years of double-digit hikes.
Other states have taken narrower approaches. At least 23 maintain statutory caps on punitive damages, and several cap non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases, though the dollar amounts and exceptions vary widely. Seven states (Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wisconsin) regulate third-party litigation funding, typically by requiring disclosure during discovery. Whether more states follow Florida’s broad model or stick to targeted measures will shape where the rankings land in coming years.