The United States is considered a litigious society because its legal system is built to make suing easy, affordable, and financially low-risk for the person bringing the claim. Federal district courts alone processed roughly 272,000 civil filings in 2025, and state courts handle millions more each year.1United States Courts. Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics 2025 The volume isn’t an accident of culture. It’s the predictable output of specific rules — about who pays legal fees, how lawyers get paid, who can enforce statutes, and where the money to pay judgments comes from — that together lower the cost of walking into court.
Americans see the results everywhere: personal injury firms on highway billboards, class action notices in email inboxes, late-night commercials promising no fees unless you win. That advertising reflects the underlying economics. Most people with a plausible claim can hire a lawyer and file suit without paying anything upfront, and losing rarely means paying the other side’s bills. The question isn’t really whether the U.S. produces a lot of lawsuits. It does. The question is which features of the system make that true.
The American Rule on Attorney’s Fees
The single biggest structural driver is a default rule known as the American Rule: each party pays its own attorney, win or lose. Most other countries follow the opposite approach, often called the English Rule, where the loser reimburses the winner’s legal costs. A loser-pays system makes people think twice before filing a weak claim, because losing means covering two legal bills instead of one.
The American Rule removes that deterrent. If you sue and lose, you walk away owing your own attorney but nothing to the other side, unless a specific statute or contract says otherwise. That changes the math on marginal cases. Claims that would never be filed under loser-pays get tested here routinely. It also levels one part of the playing field: a middle-class plaintiff suing a large corporation doesn’t face financial ruin just for losing. The tradeoff is that defendants face a steady stream of claims where the cost of fighting often exceeds the cost of settling, even when the claim is questionable.
Contingency Fees and Third-Party Funding
Removing the loser-pays risk only matters if people can afford a lawyer in the first place. Contingency fees solve that. The attorney collects nothing unless the case succeeds, at which point they take a percentage of the recovery — typically around 33%, climbing to 40% or higher for cases that go to trial. The arrangement must be in writing and spell out how costs are handled.2American Bar Association. Model Rules of Professional Conduct – Rule 1.5 Fees Financial risk shifts from the client to the attorney, who bets their time and expenses on the outcome.
Contingency arrangements aren’t available for every type of case. Lawyers are prohibited from charging them in criminal defense and most domestic relations matters, such as divorce proceedings where the fee would depend on the size of a property settlement or alimony award.2American Bar Association. Model Rules of Professional Conduct – Rule 1.5 Fees But for personal injury, medical malpractice, and most other civil claims, the contingency model is the norm. Without it, hiring a lawyer at prevailing hourly rates — around $350 nationally — would price most people out of the system.
Even on contingency, cases cost money to run. Expert witnesses charge $350 to $480 per hour. Deposition transcripts run $4.50 to $7.00 per page. Filing fees range from $50 to over $400. In cases that take years, these out-of-pocket costs reach tens of thousands of dollars before trial. Third-party litigation funding fills that gap by letting outside investors advance the money in exchange for a share of any eventual recovery. The industry has grown quickly and remains lightly regulated: as of mid-2025, only seven states had enacted laws governing these arrangements, with rules ranging from full disclosure of the funding agreement to simply making funding details available through discovery. Elsewhere, there’s no automatic requirement to tell the court or the other side that a funder is involved.
Statutes That Invite Private Enforcement
American law deliberately uses private lawsuits as a form of enforcement on top of government regulation. Congress frequently writes private rights of action directly into statutes, meaning ordinary people can sue when a company violates environmental, consumer protection, or workplace safety rules. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, lets employees sue their employers over discrimination based on race, sex, religion, color, or national origin.3U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Retaliation claims under that framework have become the most common charge filed with the EEOC in recent years.
The class action amplifies this further. A single lawsuit can represent a large group of people with the same grievance, provided the class is too numerous to sue individually, the claims share common legal questions, the lead plaintiffs’ claims are typical, and the representatives will adequately protect everyone’s interests.4Legal Information Institute. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 23 – Class Actions A $15 overcharge isn’t worth suing over alone. Multiplied by two million customers, it becomes a serious case. That mechanism turns small individual harms into economically viable claims, and it’s why technology companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and automakers face a near-constant stream of consumer suits.
Liability Insurance as the Money Pool
Lawsuits only get filed when there’s money at the end of them, and liability insurance is the quiet reason that money exists. Auto policies, homeowner’s coverage, and commercial general liability plans create a guaranteed pool available to pay claims. Plaintiffs’ attorneys know this, and it shapes which cases they take. Suing an uninsured individual with no assets is usually pointless. Suing someone whose insurer carries a $300,000 policy limit is a different calculation.
Insurers have to defend their policyholders and pay claims up to the policy limits, which turns most civil cases into a negotiation between the plaintiff’s lawyer and the insurer’s claims adjuster. Roughly 95% of civil cases resolve through settlement rather than trial. Insurers run a cost-benefit analysis on each claim: if the expected cost of a trial verdict exceeds what they’d pay to settle, they write a check. The courtroom becomes almost beside the point. The real action happens in discovery and mediation, where coverage sets the ceiling on what a case is worth. The predictability of that payout is itself an invitation to file.
The Counterweights
None of this means the system is unlimited. Several mechanisms push back against the volume, and they’re part of why “litigious” is a debated label rather than a settled one.
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 requires every attorney who signs a court filing to certify that the claims have a reasonable basis in law and fact. If a filing is frivolous, legally baseless, or filed for an improper purpose like harassment, courts can impose monetary penalties, order the attorney to pay the other side’s legal fees, or require mandatory legal education. The rule includes a 21-day safe harbor during which the offending party can withdraw or correct the filing before sanctions are sought.5Legal Information Institute. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 11 – Signing Pleadings, Motions, and Other Papers A separate federal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1927, lets courts order attorneys who multiply proceedings “unreasonably and vexatiously” to personally pay the excess costs their conduct inflicted on the other side.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 28 – 1927
Roughly 40 states and the District of Columbia have anti-SLAPP statutes that let defendants move to dismiss early when a lawsuit is filed mainly to silence critics or punish protected speech. Many of these laws let the defendant recover attorney’s fees if the dismissal is granted. There is no federal anti-SLAPP law, and federal courts are split on whether state statutes apply in federal cases. Courts can also designate repeat filers as vexatious litigants, requiring them to get court approval before filing anything new.
A sustained tort reform movement since the 1970s has produced statutory caps on non-economic damages — the compensation juries can award for pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of enjoyment of life. Caps are most common in medical malpractice cases, where about half the states have enacted some form of limit, typically ranging from $250,000 to $750,000. Supporters say caps bring predictability and hold down insurance premiums. Critics say they fall hardest on the most seriously injured plaintiffs, who absorb the same ceiling as someone with a minor injury. Several state supreme courts have struck caps down under their state constitutions.
The biggest counterweight may not be in the courts at all. Mandatory arbitration clauses sit buried in cell phone plans, credit card agreements, employment contracts, and streaming service terms. The Federal Arbitration Act makes these clauses broadly enforceable as long as the underlying contract involves commerce, which covers virtually all consumer and employment agreements.7Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 9 – 2 Arbitration is faster and cheaper than litigation, but it strips away the jury, limits discovery, and usually eliminates the right to appeal. Many clauses also waive class actions, which cuts off the mechanism that makes small-dollar consumer claims viable. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld these provisions, even in take-it-or-leave-it consumer contracts. An enormous volume of disputes that would once have been lawsuits now never reach a court at all, which complicates any simple reading of filing statistics.
Put together, the picture is less about a cultural appetite for conflict and more about a legal infrastructure that lowers the price of entering a courtroom while a separate infrastructure quietly reroutes many disputes around it. Both are features of the same system, and both are why the “litigious society” label is accurate in one frame and misleading in another.