Litigation is the legal process where one party seeks relief for damages caused by another. The two main types are criminal and civil litigation, with civil cases seeking to recover damages. Class action lawsuits consolidate similar cases into a single action. Any entity recognized under the law can be a party.
“Litigation” is the term used to describe the legal process by which one party, plaintiff or plaintiff, seeks relief for damages caused by another, commonly called a defendant. Any proceeding in a court of law where two parties are in an adversarial relationship is litigation. While any legal matter can be a type of litigation, the two main types are criminal litigation and civil litigation. Criminal litigation cases involve defendants who are alleged to have violated criminal statutes. In civil litigation, one party brings a lawsuit against another without a crime having been committed.
In criminal cases, the complainant is usually described as “the people” and a District Attorney or US Attorney represents them in seeking a remedy, often jailing the defendant or some other punishment such as paying a fine. Criminal litigation cases where there is a possibility of the death penalty being imposed can be called capital litigation cases.
In civil cases, there must be damage suffered by the plaintiff, which is alleged to have been caused by the defendant. For example, when a doctor is sued for medical malpractice, this is a form of civil litigation. If a person sues his neighbor for damages claimed due to the neighbor’s negligent snow removal, this is also a civil litigation. When a manufacturer is sued because of damage caused by a defective product, this is another form of civil suit called a product liability lawsuit. Other relatively common types of litigation are copyright litigation, usually involving a claim of infringement of intellectual property rights; debt litigation, in which a creditor files a lawsuit against a debtor; and commercial litigation, which encompasses a wide range of matters such as breach of contract, labor disputes, and shareholder matters, to name a few.
In civil litigation cases, the plaintiff seeks to recover the cost of repairing the damage alleged to have been caused by the plaintiff, and often additional pecuniary damages as well, called “pain and suffering” or “punitive damages”. Both parties can request a jury trial, or both can agree to a non-jury trial in which the judge will issue the verdict and, if necessary, an award. Each of the parties will present their case in court, at the end of which the verdict will be issued and, if it is in favor of the plaintiff, also an award. Because of the sometimes huge sums of money involved and the complexity of the law, plaintiffs and defendants often hire attorneys who specialize in that particular type of litigation. While all lawyers learn to litigate during their academic training, not all are very good at it, and many lawyers will practice law their entire careers without ever arguing a case in front of a judge and jury.
A particular type of civil litigation worthy of mention is that of class actions. A class action may be declared when multiple plaintiffs claim that the same defendant harmed them all equally. For example, if a number of owners of a particular make and model of automobile are all injured in accidents that can all be traced to some problem in the automobile’s manufacturing, attorneys can ask the judge to declare the plaintiffs a “class.” and file a legal action – in this case, a product liability lawsuit – on behalf of that class. Class action lawsuits can help the administration of justice in the United States by consolidating a series of similar or identical lawsuits, which could take months or years to judge on their own, into a single action, all to be decided as a single case.
It is not necessary for a party to a civil or criminal dispute to be a citizen or even an individual: companies can sue each other, governments can sue each other, and companies and governments can sue each other. Any entity recognized under the law can be a party, and any matter dealt with by the law can be a lawsuit addressed by litigation cases.
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