Large companies and the number of lawsuits they face; litigation case loads

Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey states (2005 at 3): “The average $1 billion-per-year company faces more than 140 cases in the US at one time.” To be more precise, the underlying data is for companies with $1.5 billion or more of revenue and the average was 142 matters, a term that includes lawsuits, regulatory proceedings, and arbitrations. The set of companies includes about 20 UK-based companies. Additionally, 72 percent had less than 100 matters pending, 34 percent had less than 10, so the median would be considerably below the average, likely less than 50 matters pending, of which more than 90 percent (using medians from the report) are law suits

Later (at 11), from data on median average time to resolution (very roughly a half year) and using a median of 50 matters pending, it follows that that approximately 100 matters a year involve that typical revenue size company. Beware that this may be extrapolating too far. (Compare, in my post of May 31, 2005, about 58 cases per year in 1995 for Canadian corporations and my post of April 8, 2005 concluding from the first Fulbright survey about 50 cases pending per litigator.)