TRAC-Reports
Insurance Lawsuits Skyrocket in Communities Hit Hard by Extreme Weather Events
(19 Oct 2022) Southwest Louisiana is home to the largest volume of civil insurance lawsuits in the country. More than one in five of the nearly 16,000 insurance lawsuits filed in federal court in the first eleven months of FY 2022 were filed in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a comparatively small community in southwest Louisiana devastated by Hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020.

Between October 2021 and the end of August 2022, a total of 15,910 insurance lawsuits were filed in federal court, topping the previous year's 14,310 with one month left to go in the fiscal year. Out of all lawsuits filed in FY 2022, 3,430 (or 22 percent of all cases) were filed at the federal court in Lake Charles alone which sits in the Western District of Louisiana. A total of 4,690 such lawsuits have been filed in all federal courts in the Western District of Louisiana in FY 2022 so far.

August 2022 saw the largest number of insurance lawsuits filed in a single month: 4,042 such cases were filed nationwide, driven largely by the 1,643 (40 percent of the total that month) filed in Lake Charles alone. TRAC previously reported on these lawsuits in September 2021, when 774 insurance lawsuits were filed in the Western District of Louisiana—a number that then seemed unusually large. August 2022 exceeded this number considerably by seeing 3.5 times more filings that that previous high.

Figures and tables that show this data, as well as important contextual references, are available in the full report here:

https://trac.syr.edu/reports/700

Each month, TRAC offers a report focused on one area of civil litigation in the U.S. district courts. In addition, subscribers to the TRACFed data service can generate custom reports by district, office, nature of suit or federal jurisdiction with data updated through August 2021. To start, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/interpreter?tab=civil

If you want to be sure to receive a notification whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1

Follow us on Twitter at:

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC's ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl

Customized queries of TRAC's data TRAC FBI Web Site TRAC DEA Web Site TRAC Immigration Web Site TRAC IRS Web Site TRAC ATF Web Site TRAC Reports Web Site FOIA Project Web Site
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University
Copyright 2022
TRAC What's New TRAC