The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts prepares various statistical reports on behalf of the Federal Judiciary, including the Federal Court Management Statistics, which are released quarterly. The most recently released batch of data comes from December 31, 2024. You might see these data cited occasionally in motions to transfer, as I happened to notice in a District of Utah opinion denying a motion to transfer to the District of Delaware.
The first trend is that—surprise!—our judges are very busy.
There have been an average of nearly 2,400 pending cases at any given time over the last six years, and total District of Delaware filings exceeded 400 filings per judgeship in 2024. Over 90% of those were civil filings.
That said, new case filings in Delaware actually dropped by 1.6% in 2024. As a result, the 2024 new-case filings per judge number is the lowest it has been in the last half decade.
And, as you can see from the chart below, new-case filings have decreased in most years since COVID:
However, even though new case filings decreased in 2024 (by 26 cases, which corresponds to that 1.6%), they didn't drop as much year-to-year as in prior two years. That's reflected by the light blue bar in the chart above.
Interestingly, while new-case filings have decreased, the total number of pending cases has gone up, as shown in the dark blue bars above. According to the data, total pending cases increased by 7.7% in 2023, then by another 4.5% in 2024.
Why is the total number of pending cases going up, when the filings are going down? It's hard to say. It could be a reduction in quickly-resolving NPE cases (perhaps after Chief Judge Connolly's disclosure orders, issued in April 2022). It could also reflect the impact of having fewer early-case dismissals under § 101 in the past few years. Or it could be something else entirely.
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