BJS — Civil Bench and Jury Trials in State Courts

Bureau of Justice Statistics (US DOJ)

Annual reportFederalPublic domainUpdated 2005
Visit source →
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/ascii/cbjtsc05.txt

The standard national reference for how civil disputes actually resolve. It documents that trials account for only about 3% of tort, contract, and property dispositions in state general-jurisdiction courts, and that tort claims make up 61% of civil trials.

A note on currency: the 2005 Civil Justice Survey of State Courts is the most recent comprehensive national dataset of its kind, so cite it with its year.

Best for: the widely-cited baseline on trial rates vs. settlement — useful context for how rarely injury cases reach a verdict.