Millions of Americans live with the possibility that, at any moment, their wages or the cash in their bank accounts could be seized over an old debt. It’s an easily ignored part of America’s financial system, in part due to a common attitude that people who don’t pay their debts deserve what’s coming to them.

A couple of years ago, we set out to find out more about the growing use of the courts to collect consumer debts. How many lawsuits are filed? Who is filing them? Who is getting sued?

The suits are filed in state and local courts, and many states rely on antiquated systems or only keep data at the county level. We ultimately collected what details we could from a variety of states and large, urban counties. Then, we wrote a series of stories sharing what we found:

But there’s a lot more to understand about the rise of this legal tactic — one that continues to alarm judges who see it firsthand.

“It seems to me that over the years I’ve become less of an authentic arbiter of disputes and more a processor of paperwork,” said Steven McMurry, a justice of the peace in Phoenix, Arizona, who has been presiding over such cases since 1998. “The thing that gets me so upset, I see all these cases and I question whether there might be some valid defense.”

Here are other important lessons we’ve learned:

Debt Buyers Are Primarily Responsible for the Rise in Lawsuits

So, what’s changed to trigger these suits? The most important difference since the late 90’s is relatively simple: the emergence of debt buying. Take New Jersey for example:

Court Judgments from Collection Suits Filed 1996-2011 in New Jersey

Source: ProPublica analysis, state court data from New Jersey’s Special Civil Part, which has jurisdiction over amounts up to $15,000.

In 1996, there were around 500 court judgments in New Jersey from suits filed by debt buyers. By 2008, that number had reached 140,000. It’s dipped since then, but the change over time is obvious. Debt buyers dominate the docket in New Jersey’s lower level civil court: In 2011, they accounted for 48 percent of the court judgments. And from 2001 through 2011, they obtained more than 1 million court judgments in New Jersey alone.

For the most part, debt buyers purchase defaulted credit card accounts, typically for a few pennies on the dollar. Starting in the late 90’s, the industry began a period of rapid growth and then exploded in the middle of the last decade. That led to a sharp spike in suits, many of them by smaller debt buying companies that have since gone out of business.

The industry is now dominated by several large companies. The largest, Encore Capital Group, typically sues through its subsidiary, Midland Funding, LLC. In 2015, Encore collected $1.2 billion nationally from consumers, more than half of that through the courts, according to its most recent annual filing.

Data from courts all over the country show the same growth of debt buyers’ role in the courts, and in most courts, we found that debt buyers filed more suits than any other type of plaintiff.

Here is what that growth looks like in three large Missouri counties for which we had data going back to 2001:

Lawsuits by Debt Buyers in Three Missouri Counties

Note: The three counties are Jackson County (Kansas City), St. Charles County (suburban area of St. Louis), and the City of St. Louis. Source: ProPublica analysis, state court data from Associate Circuit Court, which has jurisdiction over amounts up to $25,000.

Debt buyers accounted for 42 percent of debt collection suits in these counties in 2013.

And here is Miami, Florida, where the explosion in suits in the middle of the last decade was even more pronounced:

Lawsuits by Debt Buyers in Miami-Dade County

Source: State court data (all jurisdictions), ProPublica analysis.

Plaintiffs Are Represented by Attorneys, Defendants Largely Are Not

In 2011, Pressler & Pressler, the biggest collections law firm in New Jersey, obtained at least 76,000 judgments for its clients, primarily the debt buyers Encore Capital and New Century Financial Services. In about 69,000 of those suits, the firm used the same attorney: Ralph Gulko.

How does one person file more than 69,000 lawsuits in a year? According to a deposition Gulko gave as part of a lawsuit against his firm, he’d sit at a desk with two computer screens. On one screen would be a lawsuit, already prepared by the firm’s support staff and ready to be filed, and on the other, a summary of basic information about the case. If Gulko saw no problems, he’d electronically sign it and a Pressler employee would electronically file it.

The firm’s records showed that it took Gulko as little as four seconds to review a suit, and he did between 300 and 400 — sometimes as many as 1,000 — per day.

Last month, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Pressler to pay a $1 million penalty for having filed lawsuits based on unreliable information. Pressler consented to the action, which required the firm to institute a more robust review process, but said in a statement that its process had always been sufficient to prevent filing errors.

What Can Be Done Right Now to Fix the Legal System for Debt Collection

America’s out-of-date, unfair laws for collecting debts could be dramatically improved by these simple steps. Read the story.

But if there are any mistakes, it’s up to the debtors to spot them — without the aid of an attorney. In about 99 percent of Pressler’s 2011 suits, defendants didn’t have attorneys, according to our analysis. This is typical of collection suits. In 2013 in New Jersey’s lower level court, for example, more than 97 percent of defendants in debt collection cases lacked attorneys.

In Missouri that same year, about 91 percent of debtors faced suits without an attorney. Those who did have lawyers, we found, typically came from richer, whiter neighborhoods. Looking at suits from 2008 through 2012 in the St. Louis area, residents of lower-income, mostly black neighborhoods had attorneys in 4 percent of cases, while residents of upper-income, mostly white neighborhoods had them in 14 percent of cases.

Not surprisingly, suits against residents of the lower-income, black neighborhoods were much more likely to result in judgments (69 percent) than suits against residents of upper-income, white neighborhoods (53 percent).

It Matters A Lot Where You Live

Last Thursday, our story on Nebraska’s high volume of suits showed that key factors, such as the cost of filing a suit, can cause a huge difference in the number of collection suits filed from state to state. These differences between court systems haven’t received much attention, but they should. They result in vast disparities for poor debtors across the country.

Below is a comparison of garnishments — money seized from debtors’ paychecks or bank accounts — in Missouri and Nebraska:

Amount Garnished in Nebraska and Missouri, 2009-2013

Source: ProPublica analysis, state court data. For Nebraska, data includes cases filed in county courts, which have jurisdiction over suits up to $53,000. Missouri data is from Associate Circuit Court, which has jurisdiction over amounts up to $25,000. Download the Data for Nebraska & Missouri

Keep in mind that Nebraska has a population less than a third as large as Missouri’s. During this time period, $56 was garnished for every resident of Missouri. In Nebraska, it was $103. The difference is due to the more active role of collection agencies in Nebraska, which garnished $130 million over these years.

Nebraska’s higher number of suits can’t be explained by obvious differences such as a larger proportion of low-income families or more delinquencies. And, as Annie Waldman and I reported last year, a disproportionately high number of debt collection lawsuits are filed against black people, but only about 5 percent of Nebraska’s population is black.

So it’s clear that where debtors live matters at least as much as what race they are. Our study last year compared black and white neighborhoods in three different cities, and we found that in the same city, the mostly black neighborhoods had twice as many court judgments as the mostly white neighborhoods, even when accounting for income.

But compare across cities and the picture looks different. Here, for instance, is a comparison of judgments in middle income neighborhoods in Newark and Chicago, broken down by the racial makeup of the neighborhood where the defendant lived:

Judgment Rates (per 100 residents) in Middle Income Neighborhoods in Newark and Chicago

4.7 9.9 14 24.9 Chicago Newark

Note: Data includes judgments obtained through debt collection cases filed 2008-2012. We defined middle income here as annual household income between $47,000 and $74,000. Source: ProPublica analysis, state court data. Newark data is for Essex County, New Jersey (Special Civil Part); Chicago is for Cook County, Illinois (Circuit Court).