Real cases, real settlements, real docket links.

Recently verified cases

How the archive is built

Cases are pulled from CourtListener's public PACER archive (operated by the non-profit Free Law Project). The archive is queried weekly for personal-injury matters with publicly filed settlement orders, judgments, or stipulated dismissals that disclose recovery amounts. Each candidate case is reviewed by hand before being added to the archive , pure-clerical dismissals, sealed records, and confidentiality-protected settlements are filtered out.

The result is a curated dataset of cases where the recovery is publicly verifiable on the docket itself. No "average settlement" estimates, no marketing inflation, no defense-side analytics products that exclude plaintiffs from access. Every case row has a clickable docket link so you can verify the data yourself.

Cases are categorized by jurisdiction (federal district or state court), injury type (TBI, fracture, soft-tissue, surgical, wrongful death, etc.), defendant type (private individual, commercial vehicle, retailer, government, medical provider), and fact pattern (rear-end MVA, slip-and-fall, dog bite, premises liability, products liability). Each dimension can be filtered to find the closest comparable to a specific case.

What the archive does not include

The archive intentionally excludes several categories of cases that personal-injury marketing sites typically include and inflate:

• Confidential settlements where the amount is not on the docket.
• "Reported" cases from law-firm marketing pages without primary-source verification.
• Defense-verdict cases (we publish those separately when relevant).
• Pre-suit settlements that never produced a public court filing.
• Cases more than 5 years old, which often reflect outdated jury behavior and economic conditions.

Confidential pre-suit settlements are the most common category of personal-injury recovery. The Settlement Tracker tool collects anonymous, opt-in submissions from those cases , and aggregates them separately from the verified PACER archive so users can see which data is primary-source and which is voluntarily submitted.

Open the archive search

Use the Comparable Cases tool to search the archive by your specific injury, jurisdiction, and settlement range. The tool returns a list of cases with docket links, factual summaries, and the citation to the docket entries where the settlement amount appears.

Open the Comparable Cases search tool

How to use comparable-case data in settlement negotiation

The most common mistake plaintiffs and inexperienced counsel make with comparable-case data is treating it as a prediction rather than as a calibration anchor. Two cases that look identical on paper can produce very different recoveries because of facts that the case summary does not capture: the specific judge, the specific attorneys on each side, the insurance carrier's posture, the medical history that came out in deposition, and the strength of the plaintiff's testimony. Comparable cases tell you the range; they do not tell you where in the range your specific case will land.

Used correctly, the data serves three purposes during negotiation. First, it sets a defensible anchor for the opening demand. A demand that is supported by ten comparable cases at the requested value is harder for the carrier to dismiss as inflated. Second, it provides counter-evidence against insurance-industry valuation software such as Colossus, which often undervalues cases because the software's training data is biased toward defense-side settlements. Third, it informs the trial-risk discount: if comparable cases tried to verdict produce $400,000 verdicts, a $300,000 settlement is a reasonable midpoint accounting for trial risk.

Comparable-case data has special weight in jurisdictions where verdicts are publicly reported. Federal cases on PACER are the most accessible; state court verdict reports vary widely in completeness. In some jurisdictions, the state bar publishes a verdict reporter that is the gold standard for comparable research. In others, the only available data comes from settlement-reporter publications that are paywalled and accessible only to insurance-defense firms , a structural imbalance this archive is designed to correct.

Why settlement databases matter for fair recoveries

Defense-side analytics products such as Colossus and Mitchell ClaimIQ have, for two decades, given insurance carriers a substantial information advantage in personal-injury negotiations. These products are trained on millions of closed claims, allow adjusters to apply consistent valuation methodology, and produce defensible reserves that anchor negotiations. The plaintiffs' bar has historically lacked an equivalent tool. The result is a structural imbalance: the side with more data wins more often, especially in cases involving inexperienced plaintiffs' counsel or self-represented claimants.

Public comparable-case archives like the one this site indexes restore some of that balance. When a plaintiff or their counsel can point to twenty comparable cases at the requested settlement value, the carrier's software-generated anchor loses persuasive force. The negotiation moves back toward the merits , which is where it should have been from the start. Indexing PACER and other publicly available verdict data, then making the index searchable, is the simplest intervention available to address the information gap.

The archive does not pretend to solve every information asymmetry in personal-injury litigation. Defense-side products still draw on private settlement data that is not publicly filed and therefore not in this archive. Closed-record settlements with confidentiality clauses are invisible to public researchers regardless of the underlying recovery. But the publicly verifiable subset , federal court orders, judgments, and stipulated dismissals with disclosed amounts , is a substantial dataset that has not, until recently, been organized in a plaintiff-accessible form. This archive is a first step.