How we count

Every number on this site comes from a public file. Here is which one, and what we refuse to publish.

Where the lawsuit counts come from

State court records compiled by the Debt Collection Lab at Princeton University with January Advisors, downloaded 29 August 2026. Twelve states publish files: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia — 7,289,796 lawsuits in total.

We cluster spellings of the same company (an “LLC” here, a comma there) and add them together. Each page lists the exact filing names we merged, so you can check.

What we deliberately do not publish

• Default judgment rates per company. Courts record them inconsistently and several states return zero for everyone. A zero there means “not recorded”, not “never happened”, and printing it would be misleading.
• Representation rates where the field is blank. Minnesota records it on 2 rows out of 25,998. Those show as a dash, never as 0%.
• Dollar amounts that are obviously broken. Some plaintiffs show a few dollars per case, which means the amount was not captured. Those pages show counts only.
• Anything about individual people. We publish statistics about companies that file lawsuits. We do not host defendant names and we are not a background check.

Other sources

• Complaint counts and issues — CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, public and updated daily.
• Outcome rates — One-Sided Litigation, Debt Collection Lab, 2023, from 2,277,507 California court records.
• National rates — The Pew Charitable Trusts. Win rates with and without a lawyer — Utah study.
• Garnishment limits — federal Consumer Credit Protection Act. State exemptions vary.

Corrections are free

If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. We do not charge to correct or remove anything, and we never will. That policy is permanent.

Information, not legal advice. We are not a law firm.