Around the country, state courts are being flooded with the claims of massive repeat filers. These large corporate plaintiffs leverage economies of scale to bring tremendous quantities of low-value claims against largely unrepresented individual defendants. Using recently developed litigation-analytics tools, this Article presents the first nationwide study of these “assembly-line plaintiffs,” examining the top civil filers in a range of state courts across the country going back to 2004. It documents the pervasive nature of this litigation, finding that in many court systems just the top ten private filers account for between one fifth and one third of all civil litigation.
This pattern raises serious concerns. Drawing on existing empirical literature and a sample of 1000 recent case dockets, the Article describes how these cases turn state courts into near-automatic claims processors for large corporations, transferring assets from mostly absent defendants without significant scrutiny of the underlying claims. These defendants, moreover, are often particularly vulnerable low-income consumers or members of other marginalized groups. And although many concerns raised by this litigation overlap with those related to unrepresented litigants more broadly, the structural features of assembly-line litigation — its one-sidedness, high volume, and low claim value — present distinctive challenges. The Article concludes by considering a few specific potential reforms designed to meet those challenges: assessing a surcharge on frequent filers as a form of congestion pricing; enabling common defenses to be asserted as affirmative causes of action to facilitate aggregation; and moving courts away from one-case-at-a-time adjudication toward a more investigative, administrative-agency-like model.
† The Harvard Law Review has not independently reviewed the data and analyses described herein.
* Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago Law School. I would like to thank Douglas Baird, Emily Buss, Maureen Carroll, William Eskridge, Bridget Fahey, Andrew Hammond, Spencer Higgins, William Hubbard, Noah Kazis, Jona-than Masur, Luke Norris, Christine Jolls, Richard McAdams, Joel Pratt, John Rappaport, Judith Resnik, Colleen Shanahan, David Vladeck, Rachel Wilf-Townsend, and the participants in the Annual Civil Procedure Workshop, Chicagoland Junior Scholars Conference, University of Chicago Law School Junior Scholars Colloquium, and Yale Law School 2021 Moot Camp, for many helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks in particular to Spencer Caro for excellent re-search assistance. And thank you to the editors of the Harvard Law Review for their careful attention and thoughtful improvements.