The New York County Commercial Division saw a substantial increase in the number of new cases filed (i.e., a total of 102 new cases) during the first four-week span after the New York courts re-opened for non-essential matters on May 25, 2020—as compared to both February 2020 (77 new cases), the last full month of filings prior to the crisis, and a comparable period between May 27 and June 23, 2019 (87 new cases).[1]

This uptick in new cases appears largely to be attributable to the fact that litigants were barred from filing new actions in the New York court system between March 22, 2020 and May 25, 2020. During the second four-week span that followed—i.e., between June 22 to July 19, 2020—there was a marked decrease in the number of cases filed in the New York County Commercial Division (54 new cases) compared to a similar four-week period between June 24, 2019 and July 21, 2019 (98 new cases). There could be a variety of factors for this flattening in case filings, which we discuss below.