Nearly Every Plaintiff Has a Lawyer. Fewer Than 1 in 10 Defendants Do.

Walk into a state civil courtroom on a debt-collection calendar day and the adversarial system that law school teaches has already broken down before the docket is called.▸ One side is a company — often not the original creditor but a debt buyer that purchased the account for pennies on the dollar — represented by a lawyer who files the same claim hundreds of times a year. The other side is a person, usually alone, who as often as not never learned the hearing existed. The Federal Trade Commission said it plainly back in 2010: "The system for resolving disputes about consumer debts is broken." Fifteen years later, the volume flowing through that broken system has only grown.

Debt collection suits are not a small corner of the civil docket — in many states they are the docket.▸ From 1993 to 2013, the number of debt collection suits filed nationwide more than doubled, from under 1.7 million to about 4 million, and their share of all civil cases rose from roughly 1 in 9 to 1 in 4. By 2022, Pew's own calculation put the national total as high as 4.7 million suits filed in a single year — and after a pandemic-era lull, filings surged back past pre-pandemic levels in 2023 and 2024, in both rural counties and dense metro courts alike. The claims themselves are rarely large: in states with available data, about half of all debt collection cases are for less than $2,000, most often unpaid credit card balances or medical bills.

What has changed most is who is filing.▸ A small number of national debt buyers and banks now account for a majority of the docket in several states, and their share is climbing fast.

In Connecticut, the top 10 filers went from 63.9% of the debt docket in 2019 to 80.2% in 2024.▸ In Indiana the share nearly doubled, from 27.7% to 47.4%. One repeat filer, the debt buyer LVNV Funding, increased its filings by 350% over the same five years in the states Pew examined. Fewer companies, filing more cases, against a population of defendants who — as the next section shows — mostly never contest them.

A default judgment is what a court enters when the defendant does not answer or appear: the plaintiff wins automatically, with no examination of whether the debt is real, correctly amounts to what's claimed, or belongs to the person being sued.▸ Research spanning 2010 to 2019 found that fewer than 10% of defendants in debt cases have a lawyer, compared with nearly all plaintiffs — in some jurisdictions, representation falls as low as 0.6% of defendants. Courts resolved more than 70% of debt collection lawsuits with default judgments over the past decade in the jurisdictions where outcomes are tracked at all — and most states don't track them. Only two states published default-judgment figures for their debt cases as of 2018.

A 2024 Princeton University Debt Collection Lab study of 190,085 cases across four county court systems put a number on what representation is worth: defendants with a lawyer were 91.1% less likely to end up with a default judgment than those without one.▸ The same study found default rates varying widely by county — evidence that how a state regulates the lawsuit, not just whether the debt is owed, decides who wins.

New Haven County, Connecticut resolved 53% of its debt suits by default; Harris County, Texas resolved 32.8%.▸ The study's authors point to a specific mechanism: counties with stronger wage-garnishment protections saw fewer default judgments, because a judgment a plaintiff can't easily collect on is worth less to file for in the first place — except against the highest-volume bulk filers, where the protective effect nearly disappeared.

A default judgment carries the full enforcement power of a court ruling — in 35 states and Washington, D.C., that judgment can follow a person for at least a decade, and in 18 of those it can be renewed indefinitely if unpaid.▸ Courts routinely tack on accrued interest and filing fees that can exceed the original amount owed, and enforcement can include wage garnishment, bank account seizure, or property liens. None of this is hypothetical at scale: 77 million Americans — 35% of the roughly 220 million U.S. adults with a credit file — currently have a report of debt in collections, according to the Urban Institute's analysis of August 2025 credit bureau records, owing an average of $5,178 and a median of $1,349. That population is the raw material the lawsuit factory runs on.

Default-judgment and representation figures come from jurisdictions where courts publish or researchers have compiled that data — most states do not track debt-case outcomes at all, so the national default rate is almost certainly higher, not lower, than the tracked subset shown here.