This article provides an overview of federal litigation involving the largest 2,000 U.S. corporations over the period 1971-91. Reporting from a unique data set of the authors' construction, it finds that although the aggregate volume of business litigation grew during the 1970s and early 1980s, it has actually been declining in recent years in all major categories of cases; business-related litigation is heavily concentrated, with an extremely limited number of business "mega-litigants" accounting for most of the activity; this concentration is particularly evident in tort, with the result that the tort trend line outside the concentration is actually flat or declining; a good deal of the growth in litigation outside the tort area can be attributed to business itself; and big business wins overwhelmingly, as plaintiff and defendant, in cases that involve it. The general applicability of these findings is limited by the data's restriction to federal court litigation and the structure of the Integrated Federal Court Data Base from which the authors' data set was constructed. This granted, the report is by far the most comprehensive treatment of U.S. big business litigation to date, and its findings are strikingly at odds with the premises of much current policy discussion.
