5% of Plaintiffs File More Than Half of All Federal ADA Cases
We analyzed 31,000+ federal ADA cases filed between 2020 and 2025. A small number of repeat plaintiffs account for the majority of all filings.
We pulled every federal ADA civil rights case filed in U.S. district courts between 2020 and 2025 from CourtListener, a free legal data platform run by the Free Law Project. The dataset covers roughly 31,600 cases. We parsed plaintiff names from docket captions and grouped filings by name to see how the caseload breaks down.
Here is what the numbers show.
Filing Concentration
Most plaintiffs in the dataset filed a single case. But a small group at the top of the distribution accounts for a disproportionate share of all filings. 155 plaintiffs who each filed 50 or more cases produced 18,809 of the 31,627 total dockets.
Filing concentration
A small plaintiff group produced most federal ADA filings
At the top of the curve, 55 plaintiffs filed 100 or more cases each, accounting for 11,984 cases (37.9% of all filings). At the other end, 1,709 plaintiffs filed exactly one case.
The five most active plaintiffs over the full period are shown below. Click any name to see their dockets on CourtListener.
Most active plaintiffs
Top five plaintiffs by total filing volume (2020-2025)
Geography
ADA filings are not evenly spread across federal districts. Five districts account for the bulk of the volume.
Top federal districts
Five districts account for most of the visible filing volume
C.D. California leads with 6,669 cases, followed by S.D. Florida (5,786), S.D. New York (4,812), E.D. New York (2,847), and M.D. Florida (1,850).
These numbers do not hold steady year over year. Some districts show sharp swings.
Year-over-year movement
Some districts moved sharply instead of following a steady trend
S.D. New York dropped from 1,277 cases in 2022 to 407 in 2023, then climbed back to 1,092 by 2025. N.D. Illinois went from 35 filings in 2022 to 331 in 2025. C.D. California peaked at 1,231 in 2024 and fell to 696 the following year.
Case Duration
Cases filed by serial plaintiffs terminate faster than those filed by occasional or one-off plaintiffs.
Case duration
Serial filer cases terminated faster
Of the roughly 3,470 cases where we have outcome data, 40.9% ended in voluntary dismissal and 38% ended in settlement or consent judgment. Fewer than 2% reached any kind of trial. Outcome data is only available for about 12% of all cases in this dataset, so these numbers should be read with that limitation in mind.
Methodology
All data comes from CourtListener, which aggregates federal docket data from PACER through the RECAP project. We looked at federal district courts only.
Plaintiff names were pulled from docket captions (the "v." line). This means the data has some known rough edges: common surnames like Smith or Johnson may combine unrelated people into one count, and spelling variations may split a single party across multiple counts.
Case duration was computed from filing and termination dates on the docket (88% of cases had both dates). Outcome data comes from the FJC Integrated Database, which only covers about 12% of the cases in this period.
No Westlaw, no Lexis, no proprietary databases. Every district and plaintiff name in this article links to a CourtListener search so you can check the underlying dockets yourself.