If you got served with a debt-collection lawsuit in Hillsborough County last year, you were far from alone. We pulled the 2025 filing records from the Hillsborough County court and counted every debt case brought by the area’s most active collectors. Seventeen of them filed 27,057 lawsuits against local residents in a single year — more than 100 new debt suits for every business day of the year, in one Florida county. I’m Michael Ziegler, and I’ve spent 13 years on the other side of these cases, defending Floridians against exactly these filers.
Here’s what the data shows, and what it means if your name is on one of those summonses.
What we did
We reviewed 2025 civil filings in Hillsborough County for the highest-volume consumer debt collectors — the banks and debt-buying companies that sue local residents over credit cards and charged-off accounts. We pulled each filer’s case count and split it by court type: small claims versus county civil. This isn’t a survey or an estimate. It’s a straight count of public court records for the 2025 calendar year, de-duplicated by case number so the same case is never counted twice. (A short note on method is at the bottom.)
The 27,057 lawsuits
Across the 17 most active filers, here’s how 2025 broke down (each name links to what to do if that company is suing you):
| Rank | Who filed | 2025 lawsuits |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Capital One | 4,529 |
| 2 | LVNV Funding | 4,468 |
| 3 | Portfolio Recovery Associates | 4,403 |
| 4 | Midland Credit Management | 3,401 |
| 5 | Bank of America | 1,413 |
| 6 | JPMorgan Chase | 1,402 |
| 7 | Velocity Investments | 1,387 |
| 8 | Synchrony Bank | 1,352 |
| 9 | American Express | 1,193 |
| 10 | Crown Asset Management | 1,066 |
| 11 | Discover Bank | 873 |
| 12 | Citibank | 744 |
| 13 | Wells Fargo | 470 |
| 14 | Jefferson Capital Systems | 248 |
| 15 | Absolute Resolutions | 81 |
| 16 | Resurgent Receivables | 21 |
| 17 | Cavalry SPV | 6 |
Capital One alone filed more than 4,500 lawsuits. The top four filers — Capital One, LVNV Funding, Portfolio Recovery Associates, and Midland Credit Management — together account for 16,801 cases, about 62% of the total. If you’re being sued by a name near the top of that list, understand that you are one file in a very large, very routine pipeline. That’s not meant to scare you — it’s the opposite. These are high-volume operations, and high-volume operations cut corners. Corners are where defenses live.
Debt buyers vs. the original banks
Here’s the split worth paying attention to. Of the 27,057 lawsuits:
- Debt buyers (companies that bought your charged-off account for pennies and now sue in their own name — LVNV, Portfolio Recovery, Midland, Velocity, Crown, Cavalry, Jefferson Capital, Resurgent, and Absolute Resolutions): about 15,081 cases, or 55.7%.
- Original creditors (the banks whose card you actually used — Capital One, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, American Express, Synchrony, Discover, Citibank, and Wells Fargo): about 11,976 cases, or 44.3%.
So more than half the people sued over debt in Hillsborough last year were sued by a company they’ve never knowingly done business with. That matters, because a debt buyer has to prove it actually owns your specific account — the paper trail from the original bank to itself, account by account. That chain is often incomplete. If a company you don’t recognize is suing you, read our guide on what happens when your debt has been sold, and see our pages on the specific filers we defend against most, including LVNV Funding, Portfolio Recovery Associates, and Cavalry SPV. There’s a fuller list on our Florida debt collection companies page.
Most of these are small-claims cases
More than three out of four of the 2025 lawsuits — 76.9%, or 20,820 cases — were filed in small claims court, meaning the amount sued for was $8,000 or less. The remaining 6,237 cases (23.1%) were filed as county civil actions.
Don’t let “small” fool you. A $1,800 lawsuit you ignore becomes a $1,800 default judgment, and a judgment is what lets a creditor try to garnish your wages or freeze your bank account. Most of the worst outcomes I see didn’t happen because someone lost in court — they happened because someone never responded at all. Here’s what happens after a judgment is entered, and why the days right after you’re served matter more than almost anything else.
The filings are climbing
This isn’t a shrinking problem. Filings rose across 2025 — from 5,791 in the first quarter to 7,281 in the fourth, about a 26% increase, with the third quarter (7,711 filings) the busiest and October (2,640 filings) the single busiest month of the year. For scale, that 27,057 total is roughly 1.9 times the 14,314 debt lawsuits we counted next door in Pinellas County for the same year. Whatever’s driving it — rates, balances, post-holiday collections — the trend in Hillsborough is up, not down.
What to do if one of them sued you
If your name is on one of these 27,057 cases, three things are true at once: this is routine, you have a deadline, and you have options. Being sued is not the same as losing. Debt suits in Hillsborough are filed in the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit, and county-civil and small-claims cases are handled at the George E. Edgecomb Courthouse in downtown Tampa. In Florida you generally have 20 days from the date you’re served to file a written response; a small-claims case instead begins with a pretrial conference you are required to attend. Either way, responding — on paper, on time — changes the whole posture of the case.
Served with a debt lawsuit in Hillsborough County? Call (727) 538-4188 or book your Free Debt Freedom Strategy Session. The deadline to respond is short — the sooner we look at your summons, the more options you have.
For more than a decade, our firm has defended Floridians against these exact filers — we’ve handled thousands of consumer debt matters and even won at the federal appellate level (Daniels v. SPS). Depending on your situation, the right move might be to fight the case on the merits, to negotiate a documented settlement, or — when one lawsuit is really the first of several coming — to wipe the slate through bankruptcy. We handle collection lawsuits, bankruptcy, credit-reporting errors, and collection harassment under one roof, so the advice you get isn’t limited to one tool. Start with our overview of debt collection lawsuit defense in Florida, and if the suit is over an old credit card, read about the Florida credit card lawsuit time limits that may apply.
Whatever you do, don’t do nothing. That’s the one choice that turns a routine lawsuit into a judgment.
A note on the data
These figures come from Hillsborough County’s 2025 civil court records, counted by named plaintiff across small claims and county civil filings for the calendar year and de-duplicated by case number. The 27,057 total reflects the 17 highest-volume consumer debt collectors filing in the county; it is not a count of every debt case filed. Figures are filing counts only and do not reflect case outcomes or any finding of wrongdoing.
Journalists, researchers, and other sites are welcome to cite this study with attribution to Ziegler Diamond Law (attorneydebtfighters.com) — the chart above is free to republish with a link back. To request the underlying methodology or full dataset, contact our office.
This article is general information, not legal advice. For Florida residents, contact Ziegler Diamond Law for a Free Debt Freedom Strategy Session.
Served with a debt lawsuit in Hillsborough County? Call (727) 538-4188 or schedule your Free Debt Freedom Strategy Session. The sooner we look at your summons, the more options you have.
By Michael A. Ziegler, Esq.
