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On 9 May 2025, at 4.15 pm, Diogo Leitao Requena will defend his PhD thesis How and Why Organizations Litigate: Empirical Evidence from Dutch Commercial Court Cases

The goal of Diogo Leitao Requena’s PhD thesis is to understand how and why firms and other organizations (such as local governments, foundations, the state) litigate in Dutch civil courts. These involve commercial court cases regarding for instance bankruptcies, contractive disputes, intellectual property and third part damage.

He explores three different questions on this topic. First, why the number of commercial court cases has been declining since the end of the financial crisis. Second, whether engaging in commercial litigation (as a plaintiff or defendant) increases the chance of being involved in a bankruptcy proceeding. And third, whether litigation experience matters for the litigation strategy employed by organizations. To be more specific, he studies whether more experienced organisations have longer or shorter court cases.

To answer these questions, he employed quantitative methods on court case administrative data from the Dutch judiciary and interviewed experts (judges, lawyers and other legal experts) to find explanations.

The results indicate that:
 

• The decline of commercial court cases is both cyclical (related to the business cycle) and structural, where factors such as increasing litigation costs and increasing court predictability play an essential role in this decline.
   
• Both defendants and plaintiffs have an increased chance of having a bankruptcy proceeding (as a defendant) after the occurrence of other commercial cases. However, the research did not find a strong indication of a contagion effect, as plaintiffs who face financially distressed defendants in courts do not have a higher chance of being in a bankruptcy proceeding than plaintiffs who face not-financially distressed defendants.
   
• Experienced litigants have shorter cases in the role (plaintiff or defendant) in which they are experienced. This might be interpreted as a learning effect for litigants and not as litigants abusing the court system to postpone unfavourable judgements.

Rising inequality among litigating firms

Dutch courts are not losing their importance, even if the number of cases are declining, Diogo Leitao Requena states. The cases that do go to court, are complex and involve more money. Because of this, and because the workload as a consequence of the complexity is on the rise, more legal costs are involved too.

Firms are getting more centralized in their legal decision and often have their own legal department. And since the financial crisis, especially banks, are more focused on preventing disputes at an earlier stage as they seem to involve lawyers more actively when formulating contracts.

The data show a small worrisome trend in the accessibility of courts, since costs have risen and companies that are more experienced seem to perform better. That may be a disadvantage for smaller companies compared to bigger ones, because the relative cost of a case for a smaller firm will be considerably higher.

Diogo Leitao Requena is a lecturer and a PhD student at Utrecht University School of Economics (U.S.E.).