Who we are
One person, public files, and a rule about staying inside what the data actually supports.
Ellis Warner
Data lead & editor
I count court records. That is the whole job. Twelve states publish files listing who filed debt lawsuits and how many — 7,289,796 of them at the last download — and until now nobody had added them up for the people on the receiving end.
I am not a lawyer and this is not a law firm. I have no legal training and I do not give legal advice. What I do is arithmetic on public files, and then I write down what the arithmetic says.
Most of the work is unglamorous. The same company files under nine spellings, so they have to be clustered. Minnesota records whether a defendant had a lawyer on two rows out of 25,998, so that column has to be suppressed rather than reported as zero. Some plaintiffs show four dollars a case, which means the amount was never captured. Deciding what not to publish takes longer than publishing.
[email protected] — corrections read first.
How a page here gets made
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 · Download | The twelve published state court files, straight from the Debt Collection Lab at Princeton. No intermediary, no scraping. |
| 2 · Cluster | Merge spellings of the same plaintiff. Every page lists the exact filing names that were merged, so the working is visible. |
| 3 · Count | Filings, amounts, representation rates, year by year, per state. Add a rank and a share of that state's docket. |
| 4 · Suppress | Drop every field the courts did not really record. This step removes more numbers than it keeps. |
| 5 · Cite | Name the source file on the page, and invite anyone to tell us it is wrong. |
What we are qualified to tell you
How many lawsuits a company has filed, in which states, over what amounts, how many of the people it sued had a lawyer, and whether it is filing more or less than it used to. That is arithmetic on public records, and we show the working on the method page.
What we are not qualified to tell you
What to do about your case. We do not know your facts, your state's rules, or your deadline, and anyone on the internet who claims to without reading your papers is guessing. Where a decision matters, we point you to the official court record and to free legal aid, which exists in every state and handles exactly this.
Three rules that do not change.
We never charge you. Not for pages, not for forms, and never to correct or remove something. Charging people to fix their own record is how other sites in this space got in trouble, and it is a line we will not go near.
We report, we do not characterise. "Filed 577,491 lawsuits" is a fact from a court file. Calling a company predatory is an opinion, and you will not find us doing it — harsh language here only ever appears as a quote from a regulator, with a citation.
We publish about companies, never about people. We count plaintiffs who file lawsuits. We do not host defendants' names and we will not become a background check.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. It is free, it always will be, and you do not need a lawyer to ask.