Photo: Shutter_M/Shutterstock.comNew case filings in Houston and one of its suburbs dropped substantially in April and May as people hunkered down during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report.
In Harris County, which includes Houston, the district courts saw a 27% decrease in civil case filings in April and a 28% decrease in May compared with the same months last year, said the report by Lex Machina, a legal data analytics company. In the Harris County county courts, there was a 68% drop in April and a 62% drop in May.
The report includes a study of civil case data from nine state courts in Texas, California and Nevada. Across those nine state courts, there was a 53% decrease in total case filings in April 2020 compared with the same time in 2019. In May, there was a 49% decrease compared to last year.
“The COVID-19 pandemic, it’s affected all aspects of life in general, but certainly professional lives, and the legal profession as well. You have these courthouses that essentially halted day-to-day operations,” said Gloria Huang, legal content associate at Lex Machina in Menlo Park, California. “Some had put in other avenues in place such as drop boxes or e-filing, but largely, you had a closure to a lot of avenues of case filing that were open before. Some courts, when they opened, you saw a spike in the cases.”
Fort Bend County, which is adjacent to Houston, had a new-case filing decline more severe than Harris County. The district courts there experienced a 51% decline in new case filings in April and a 52% drop in May. The county courts in Fort Bend County saw a 78% decrease in April and a 67% decline in May.
“Case filings for limited jurisdiction cases were more impacted than general jurisdiction cases in the California and Texas courts that Lex Machina covers,” said the company’s report, “The Impact of the Pandemic Shutdown on New Case Filings in State Courts.”
Lex Machina’s study also included figures for the Delaware Court of Chancery, Clark County in Nevada and California courts in San Bernardino, Sacramento and Los Angeles.
Delaware was an outlier—its courts saw 4% more filings in April and 15% more filings in May.
But the remaining eight courts all experienced new-case filing drops in April ranging from 27% in Harris County district courts to 97% in superior courts in both San Bernardino and Sacramento County. Things picked up a bit in May, but still ranged from 16% fewer filings in Sacramento County superior court, to 67% in Fort Bend County county courts.
Federal filings down
When it comes to federal courts, there’s been a decline in new-case filings, but not as dramatic as these nine state courts. During the first four weeks of the pandemic, there was a 22% decline in filings in federal courts, reported Law.com. But filings were already ticking back up in April and May in federal courts, said another Law.com article.
Huang, the Lex Machina analyst, noted that attorneys use PACER as a uniform e-filing system for cases in federal courts nationwide. But filing systems in state courts vary widely—some don’t even use e-filing.
“That will definitely impact case filings in a way that will show up in a larger decrease,” Huang said.
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