The average insurance company in the United States currently faces 40 lawsuits, five of which it initiated, according to recent survey of corporate counsel by the law firm Fulbright & Jaworski.

"Accepting the reality that litigation is a constant in their business lives, close to 90 percent of U.S. corporate counsel have no plans to reduce the number of outside lawyers that handle their cases," the study's authors noted. "The ubiquity of litigation in American business goes a long way toward explaining the overriding concern corporate counsel have with controlling litigation expenses. Indeed, respondents expressed more concern about what they perceived as the high costs of litigation than they did about winning or losing the underlying lawsuits."

The insurance industry is not as litigious as Corporate America as a whole, however. Nearly 90 percent of the nation's corporations are engaged in lawsuits, with the average $1-billion company involved in 147 cases at a time. Although insurance companies were toward the lower end of the scale regarding the number of lawsuits filed during the past year, the industry was the second highest in terms of arbitrations initiated.