Chapter 7

Litigation Cost as a Percentage of Profits and Losses

In the previous chapter, we explained how we derived the Litigation 100. In a nutshell, the Litigation 100 reranked the first 100 companies in 2013 Fortune 500 by the number of federal court cases to which each company was a party in 2012.

Besides the caseload rankings, the larger point is that we can now ­estimate the cost of commercial tort litigation per company per year.

After a downward adjustment, the litigation cost per case turned out to be about $350,000. Here, we multiply the caseload data by the cost per case, and so extend the Litigation 100 to show each company’s estimated (federal court only) total commercial tort litigation cost in 2012.

2013 rank

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