At any level of legal jurisdiction, the American court system tends to operate as a system of working groups. That is, even as particular litigants and litigation are constantly changing, a core group of actors – i.e., judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys – tend to retain a consistent presence in the courtroom. The Supreme Court is much the same. While the petitions and underlying legal issues granted review in any given term are expected to be different than those in the year prior, much of the same group of attorneys can be expected to appear behind the lectern year in, and year out.

Just this year, Neal Katyal argued his 50^th case in front of the justices nearly two decades after his first. Others like Paul Clement, Lisa Blatt, Kannon Shanmugam, Carter Phillips, Ted Olson, and Gregory Garre have likewise become namesakes in the legal community for their repeated appearances arguing at the Court. This small population of repeat players epitomizes an institution of familiarity, whereby a niched group of private lawyers and members of the Solicitor General’s office are expected to be arguing at the Court more often than the broader membership of the Supreme Court Bar.

However, the totality of the Court’s diminutive (and consistently diminishing) caseload leaves only a small window to measure attorney participation. From the thousands of petitions filed in a given year, recent trends suggest that only 50 to 70 will be granted review. Even assuming a different attorney represented the petitioner and respondents for every petition in the 2022 filing period (approximately 4120 cases), granting only 65 of these means that less than 2 percent of the total attorney pool will actually represent their clients in oral arguments. For comparison, this is roughly the same probability as the Mets winning this year’s World Series (as of July 2023). (Highly) Improbable, but certainly not impossible.

Most Common Filers

Several studies in political science have leveraged the impact of the Court’s repeat players – and of the Solicitor General in particular. But again, participation in oral arguments represents such a constrained measure of attorney engagement. While most petitions for review are denied without any accompanying justification, I was interested in whether filings (more generally) follow similar niche trends – i.e., whether we find the same consistency in attorneys filing at the Court as we do with those participating in oral arguments. Even more, rather than just focusing on petitions for certiorari, I was able to leverage my data collection efforts to further consider applications (which have garnered considerable attention in recent years due in large part to the public’s fascination with the shadow docket) and other motions.

Analyzing filing trends across the 2018 to 2022 terms reveal a few notable findings:

Petitioners	Respondents	All
Kevin Joel Page	Noel J. Francisco*	Noel J. Francisco*
Christopher A. Curtis	Elizabeth B. Prelogar*	Elizabeth B. Prelogar*
Paul D. Clement	Jeffrey B. Wall*	Jeffrey B. Wall*
Elizabeth B. Prelogar*	Brian H. Fletcher*	Brian H. Fletcher*
Bradford Wayne Bogan	Fadwa A. Hammoud	Kevin Joel Page
Adam Ryan Nicholson	Celia A. Terenzio	Fadwa A. Hammoud
Kristin L. Davidson	Michael Marc Glick	Benjamin Michael Flowers
Brianna Fuller Mircheff	Benjamin Michael Flowers	Michael Marc Glick
James Matthew Wright	Carolyn M. Snurkowski	Celia A. Terenzio
Kristin Michelle Kimmelman	Trisha Meggs Pate	Carolyn M. Snurkowski
*Served as (Acting) Solicitor General During Observation Period (OT18-OT22)

1. The overwhelming majority of filings place the (Acting) Solicitor General as respondents. Given how the Solicitor General is the chief legal representative whenever the United States is named as a party at the Supreme Court, it is perhaps unsurprising that the SG is included so frequently.
2. While not in the top-10 for petitioners (or applicants), Noel Francisco (SG for President Trump) remains a narrow leader in total filings during this 5-term filing period. However, the margin is small enough that current-Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is very likely to surpass his total in the upcoming term.
3. Apart from Paul Clement and those who served as (Acting) Solicitors General in this period, few of the ‘expected’ repeat players (i.e., those who frequently appear in oral arguments) appear prominently. Instead, a few common themes find state Attorney and Solicitors General (e.g., Ben Flowers) or Federal Public Defenders (e.g., Kevin Page).

Attorney Matchups

Alternatively, analyzing filing success as a reflection of unique matchups in petitioner and respondent attorneys reveals fairly consistent trends. These counts comprise combinations of applications, motions, and certiorari petitions on the plenary docket – i.e., it includes all instances where applications or motions are associated with petitions that were eventually filed at the Court, as well as circumstances where multiple petitions were linked together as a single adjoined filing. In particular, we find:

Petition GRANTED	Petition DENIED
Mithun Mansinghani v. Zachary Charles Schauf	Kevin Joel Page v. Noel J. Francisco*
James Matthew Wright v. Elizabeth B. Prelogar*	Kevin Joel Page v. Elizabeth B. Prelogar*
Kathryn Shephard v. Elizabeth B. Prelogar*	Christopher A. Curtis v. Noel J. Francisco*
Kevin Joel Page v. Noel J. Francisco*	Adam Ryan Nicholson v. Elizabeth B. Prelogar*
Andrew Lee Adler v. Elizabeth B. Prelogar*	Kristin L. Davidson v. Elizabeth B. Prelogar*
*Served as (Acting) Solicitor General During Observation Period (OT18-OT22)

• With the exception of the most successful pairing, the five most common matchups in proceedings that eventually led to the granting or denial of certiorari petitions concern filings against the United States (where the Solicitor General is recorded as counsel of record for the respondents).
• Speaking of the most successful pairing, it’s worthwhile to note that the source of the high rate of grants between Mithun Mansinghani and Zachary Charles Schauf comes from Shauf representing multiple plaintiffs against the State of Oklahoma (including in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta), where Mansinghami is Solicitor General.
• Trying to discern any consistent trends in attorney success as a function of higher petition volumes yields mixed results. Neither Mansinghami nor Schauf are found in the first table indicating the most common filers, and attorneys like Kevin Page are among the most frequent filers but have high rates of both grants and denials.

Focusing a bit more on that last point, we analyzed the most and least successful filers as a function of how often they file. Looking explicitly at attorneys who have at least 5 granted and/or denied petitions, volumes of success become much more discernable.

Attorney	Petitions GRANTED	Percent of Total Filings
Elizabeth B. Prelogar	179	0.04
Noel J. Francisco	32	0.02
Brian H. Fletcher	23	0.03
Paul D. Clement	16	0.21
Mithun Mansinghani	14	0.2
Lisa Schiavo Blatt	11	0.39
Kannon K. Shanmugam	10	0.23
Zachary Charles Schauf	9	0.2
Neal Kumar Katyal	9	0.17
Jeffrey B. Wall	8	0.01
Attorney	Petitions DENIED	Percent of Total Filings
Elizabeth B. Prelogar	3390	0.73
Noel J. Francisco	1491	0.81
Jeffrey B. Wall	1023	0.94
Brian H. Fletcher	603	0.91
Fadwa A. Hammoud	135	0.94
Kevin Joel Page	123	0.85
Benjamin Michael Flowers	98	0.86
Celia A. Terenzio	96	0.97
Christopher A. Curtis	92	0.93
Carla Suzanne Bechard	83	0.94

Looking beyond US Solicitors during the 2018 to 2022 terms (i.e., Prelogar, Francisco, Wall, and Fletcher), those with the greatest measures of achieving review participated in discernably fewer petitions. For example, attorneys like Paul Clement, Lisa Blatt, and Kannon Shanmugam – all of whom are well known for consistently arguing at the Court – shared success in at least 1/5 of their total filings. That is, for every five petitions, applications, or motions they participated in between 2018 and 2022, at least one of them coincided with a granted petition (to some degree). Alternatively, attorneys who filed or participated in discernably greater volumes of petitions tended to receive diminished reciprocity from the justices. However, this metric says little about the attorneys as much as it says about the justices, whose caseload continue to diminish as they exercise greater (or perhaps, stricter) discretion in what ‘types’ of cases to grant review.

However, perhaps the most interesting finding is the interconnectivity of those filing at the Court. Focusing just on those who filed at least 10 total petitions, applications, or motions reveals a discernable web of entanglement, whereby attorney matchups share fairly consistent association across observations. That is, notwithstanding a minority of attorneys on the outer fringes of the network figure below, a considerable portion of attorneys share associations.

Simply put, the figure employs a network space to demonstrate how frequently attorneys share opposing counsel. For example, let’s assume that Attorney ‘A’ matches up against Attorney ‘B’. This matchup would be illustrated by two ‘nodes’ (i.e., the dots) connected by a line to represent their connectivity in the network space. When Attorney ‘B’ subsequently files with Attorney ‘C’ as opposing counsel, the line now connects Attorneys ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’. These matchups can continue ad infinitum as new attorneys enter the population and the space becomes crowded with interconnected nodes and every pairing becomes possible (e.g., ‘A’ v. ‘C’, ‘D’ v. ‘A’, ‘E’ v. ‘G’…). The result is the figure above, where larger nodes represent attorneys with the greater number of appearances in the filings.  

As one might expect, the largest (yellow and green) nodes are the Solicitors General found in the observation period (i.e., E. Prelogar, B. Fletcher, J. Wall, and N. Francisco). The slightly smaller blue nodes represent those remaining from the preceding tables. Yet, with the exception of a few outliers, most who filed consistently also appear to share at least 2 opposing counsels with others. In essence, we find repeat behaviors even among those who might not meet the ‘conventional’ echelon of being in that niche group of repeat players who consistently argue at the Court. Notwithstanding a considerable Bar population, much of the Court’s filings are represented by a smaller, consistent group of attorneys.

The author would like to thank Dr. Adam Feldman for publishing his convoluted analysis 😉

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