As The Am Law Daily reported Thursday, we’ve been scouring a recently released report of all federal court statistics for the 2007 fiscal year (pdf) for trends. Mostly, we wanted to know, are civil trials disappearing?
The answer, it turns out, is tough to pin down. The first place we looked was here, which shows nearly 10,000 civil cases that went to trial in U.S. District Courts — up from between 3,500 and 4,000 per year since 2004. We were struck by such a stunning number, so we reached out to litigation-watcher Marc Galanter at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s law school — he found it equally shocking.
