Criterica Intelligence — 23,706 production models trained on 475M+ real court records
State of Legal Risk · 2026 Baseline Edition

What outcomes and timelines actually look like.

A baseline read on outcome odds and resolution timelines across United States federal civil litigation, drawn from Criterica's proprietary outcomes corpus. Matters filed 2010 and later. The point is not an average. It is how far the numbers move once you look by venue and case type.

Outcome intelligence
63.9%
of matters that reach a disposition favoring one party resolve in the plaintiff's favor.

That figure is computed over 599,888 decided matters. The more important fact sits underneath it: only about one matter in five ever reaches such a disposition. The rest settle, transfer, consolidate, or are dismissed. For anyone pricing legal risk, the question was never only who wins. It is how often a case is decided at all, and how long it takes to get there.

Durational intelligence

Half resolve in seven months. The slowest tenth run past two years.

Time to resolution is the lever that turns an outcome into a return. Capital committed to a matter that runs three years earns a very different rate than the same outcome in nine months. This is the distribution most underwriting never sees.

84days
25th percentile
211days
Median
444days
75th percentile
840days
90th percentile
Venue dispersion

Same matter, different venue, a different bet.

Plaintiff-favorable odds range from 47 to 77 percent across the federal circuits, and median resolution from 131 to 356 days. Venue is not a footnote. It is a primary input.

Circuit
Plaintiff-favorable
Median days
First
64.6%
315
Second
65.9%
240
Third
46.9%
131
Fourth
73.0%
356
Fifth
55.4%
210
Sixth
65.1%
259
Seventh
61.4%
252
Eighth
77.4%
244
Ninth
64.4%
182
Tenth
66.5%
186
Eleventh
66.1%
168
D.C.
73.8%
176
Case-type intelligence

Outcome and duration move together, and not how intuition expects.

Pharmaceutical and product matters carry strong plaintiff odds but run past two years. Patent and contract resolve in roughly two hundred days. Pricing that ignores the timeline misprices the asset.

Case type
Plaintiff-favorable
Decided (n)
Median days
Pharmaceutical product liability
82.4%
17,130
718
Patent
76.5%
2,896
196
Employment (civil rights)
72.5%
26,152
293
Product liability
55.5%
10,390
798
Insurance
53.1%
18,250
238
Contract
47.6%
27,470
210
Other personal injury
44.2%
16,108
248
Wage and hour
45.2%
6,574
230
Motor vehicle injury
26.3%
5,157
293
Methodology and confidence

How to read this, and how far to trust it.

Source
Criterica's proprietary outcomes corpus of United States federal civil litigation. Figures use matters filed 2010 and later unless noted.
What "plaintiff-favorable" means
The share of matters that reach a disposition favoring one party which resolve for the plaintiff. It is conditional on a party-favoring disposition, and most matters resolve another way. Sample sizes are shown so the reader can weigh each figure.
Duration
Calendar days from filing to termination. Reported as distribution percentiles and medians, never a single average, because the spread is the risk.
Validation
The intelligence behind these figures runs across 23,706 production models. Each one is tested against real outcomes it was never shown, on real records only, with zero synthetic data. A model only reaches production after it proves out on outcomes that already happened. Methods are proprietary.
This edition
A baseline. It states what is, not where it is heading. Trend reporting begins once a second period is measured.
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