How do litigation trackers differ in methodology when counting government vs. personal lawsuits?
Executive summary
Litigation trackers vary sharply in how they count government versus personal lawsuits because their methodological choices—scope definitions, data sources, aggregation rules, and presentation—are shaped by technical capacity and institutional purpose [1] [2]. Topic-focused trackers for public interest litigation or executive actions often apply exclusion rules and treat related filings as a single “case,” while commercial analytics and docket aggregators emphasize exhaustive coverage, jurisdictional breadth, and machine-driven indexing that can inflate or deflate counts depending on settings [3] [1] [2] [4].
1. How scope definitions drive differences in counts
Who a tracker considers a relevant party is the first methodological fork: Just Security’s tracker explicitly excludes suits in which the administration is the plaintiff and therefore counts only challenges to government actions, an inclusion rule that materially reduces government-side tallies compared with trackers that count suits filed by the government [1]. By contrast, specialized trackers like the Public Health Law Center curate “select lawsuits” within discrete practice areas—commercial tobacco, climate, healthy eating—meaning many private suits outside those topics are intentionally omitted, producing lower totals but higher topic relevance [3].
2. Data sources: dockets, filings, and the state/federal divide
Differences in underlying data explain a lot: commercial platforms and docket services pull from centralized ECF feeds and state dockets to deliver broad coverage and alerts, and they highlight that the “majority of litigation occurs in state court,” a fact that matters when trackers focus only on federal filings [2]. Litigation analytics vendors such as Westlaw and Thomson Reuters build filters for judges, courts, and reported status, enabling count adjustments by reported decisions or venue—choices that change headline numbers depending on which courts a tracker indexes [4] [5].
3. Aggregation rules and “what counts as one case”
Trackers differ on whether they collapse related filings into one entry or list every complaint, amended complaint, or parallel suit separately; Just Security’s methodology treats clusters of related lawsuits (e.g., many suits over an immigration policy) as a single case to avoid double-counting, a deliberate aggregation that reduces apparent volume compared to raw docket scrapes [1]. Conversely, analytics workbenches and docket crawlers often surface multiple filings tied to a dispute because their value proposition is granular alerting and analytics rather than curated narrative, which can inflate counts unless post-processing rules are applied [2] [6].
4. Topic, institutional mission and editorial choices
Many trackers are mission-driven: lawyers’ clinics and advocacy groups create tools to help grantees or advance policy goals, and they will include amicus briefs, select documents, and summaries while excluding tangential suits—choices that foreground impact over completeness [7] [3]. Law-industry publications and university libguides aggregate trackers and emphasize sortable metadata—case name, challenged action, status—so users can reinterpret counts; those metadata practices influence whether a tracker reports “cases pending” or “unique legal issues,” which are different counting philosophies [8] [6].
5. Automation, analytics and the technical margin of error
Automated litigation systems, no-/low-code platforms, and litigation document analysis tools enable fast indexing, deduplication, and precedent filtering, but they also introduce methodological variance depending on rulesets for tagging, jurisdictional parsing, and document classification [9] [10] [5]. Platforms that succeed at deduplication and entity resolution will present lower, cleaner counts; those that prioritize immediacy and alerting without sophisticated consolidation will show higher counts with more noise [2] [10].
6. What readers must watch for—bias, transparency, and comparability
Because trackers are constructed artifacts, methodological transparency matters: omission rules (e.g., excluding government-as-plaintiff), aggregation decisions, and jurisdictional scope are all explicit choices that reflect editorial or institutional agendas and will skew comparative tallies unless disclosed [1] [7]. Commercial analytics stress customizable filters and judicial metrics to help users reframe counts for litigation strategy, while advocacy trackers trade breadth for curated relevance; readers must therefore compare methodology notes, not just headline totals, to understand whether a tracker counts “government actions challenged,” “lawsuits filed by government,” or every docket entry in between [4] [1].