Federal Lawsuit Outcomes — Disposition Statistics from 10.76 Million U.S. District Court Civil Cases (1988–2025)

Disposition statistics computed from 10,760,870 civil cases terminated in the 94 U.S. federal district courts between 1988 and 2025, from the Federal Judicial Center's Integrated Database (IDB). Four CSV tables: outcomes by case type (15 nature-of-suit groups), outcomes by state (50 states + DC, districts mapped via AO court-location codes verified against FIPS county codes), outcomes by year (1988–2025), and the full disposition-code breakdown. Key findings: Only 1.49% of federal civil cases reach any form of trial (jury 0.89%, bench 0.52%, directed verdict 0.08%) — the "vanishing trial" quantified across the full record 23.14% end in an explicitly recorded settlement (a lower bound; a further 13.96% are voluntary dismissals that frequently follow private settlements) Medical malpractice is the trial outlier: 6.75% of cases tried, ~4.5× the overall rate Motor vehicle cases settle most often (49.24%) with the highest plaintiff judgment share (48.42%) Median time from filing to termination: 242 days overall; 767 days for product liability (MDL effect) Method notes: "Settled" = AO disposition code 13. Trial = codes 7/8/9. Dollar fields in the IDB are coded in thousands and capped, so only medians/percentiles are published, never sums. Full methodology and analysis: https://settlementinsight.com/research/federal-lawsuit-outcomes Source data: Federal Judicial Center, Integrated Database (civil, 1988-forward), https://www.fjc.gov/research/idb (public domain). This release provides the processed aggregations used in the Settlement Insight research study.