Personal injury is one of the most common types of lawsuit in the United States. With ubiquitous billboards and television advertising, personal injury attorneys represents perhaps the purest form of lawsuit – a plaintiff was injured, and they seek compensation.
The vast majority of personal injury litigation takes place in state court. This is because federal court requires a breach of federal law, or for both parties to be from different states, which is not likely to occur in a conventional personal injury case. However, according to Docket Alarm analytics, over 71,000 cases were filed within the last five years under federal court’s personal injury Nature of Suit code.
Two trends are revealed by analyzing the top defendants in these lawsuits. The top two parties, both entities affiliated with British Petroleum, faced over 5,000 lawsuits. The litigation (in aggregate) stems from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill from 2010, indicating that the legal consequences of that disaster are present over a decade later.
The oil spill skews the geographic data, too. The Eastern District of Louisiana and the Southern District of Mississippi are the two courts that saw the most personal injury litigation, despite a much lower population concentration than courts in New York and California.
The fourth-highest defendant in federal personal injury cases is Wal-Mart, a function of the company’s massive, nationwide footprint. Unlike with BP, there does not seem to be a single nexus of litigation against the company.
The third most frequently sued defendant for federal personal injury litigation is the federal government. While some of the litigation against the government can be attributed to its sheer scope and the ways that it can impact American lives, the majority of lawsuits filed against it in recent years are similar to those against BP – they are lawsuits filed in connection with the Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022. That statute was passed to provide a compensation structure for Americans who were exposed to toxic waster at the Camp Lejeune military installation. As such, the cases are concentrated in the Eastern Disatrict of North Carolina federal court. Additionally, the claims were largely filed in early 2023
